“Fulk!” The name exploded out of Briant as if it were a dart shot from his side arm. “This is Fulk’s way out!” His pale face had expression enough now. “But he would have to deal with Siric and Lord Duarte, too! I think that Fulk has been very busy. That shieldman had so many details of a raid that he must have been acquainted with a direct report.”
“A messenger from the sea just landed. I heard him babble that much,” Koris supplied.
“From the sea!” The witch was on her feet, her scarlet and gold draperies stirring about her. “Fulk of Verlaine cannot be termed in any way a simpleton, but there is a swiftness of move here, a taking advantage of every chance happening which smacks of something more than just Fulk’s desire to protect himself against Yvian’s vengeance!”
There was a stormy darkness in her eyes as she regarded all three of them coldly. She might almost have been numbering them among hostile elements.
“This I do not like. Oh, some tale from Verlaine might have been expected; Fulk needed a story to throw into Yvian’s teeth lest the stones of his towers be rained down about his own ears. And he is perfectly capable of spitting both Siric and Durate to give added credence and cover his tracks. But the moves come too swiftly, too well fitting into a pattern! I would have sworn—”
She strode up and down the chamber, her scarlet skirts swirling about her. “We are mistresses of illusion, but I will take oath before the Power of Estcarp that that storm was no illusion! Unless the Kolder have mastered the forces of nature—” Now she stood very still, and her hands flew to her mouth as if to trap words already spoken. “If the Kolder have mastered—” her voice came as a whisper. “I cannot believe that we have been moved hither and yon at their bidding! That I dare not believe! Yet—” She whirled about and came directly to Simon.
“Briant I know, and what he does and why, all that I know. And Koris I know, and what drives him and why. But you—man out of the mists of Tor, I do not know. If you are more than you seem, then perhaps we have brought our own doom upon us.”
Koris stopped polishing the ax blade. The cloth fell to the floor as his hands closed about the haft.”He was accepted by the Guardian,” he said neutrally, but his attention centered upon Simon with the impersonal appraisal of a duelist moving forward to meet a challenge.
“Yes!” The woman from Estcarp agreed to that. “And it is impossible that what Kolder holds to its core cannot be uncovered by our methods. They could cloak it, but the very blankness of that cloak would make it suspect! There is one test yet.” She plucked at the throat fastening of her robe and drew forth the dull jewel she had worn out of Estcarp. For a long moment she held it in her hands, gazing down into its heart, and then she slipped the chain from about her neck and held it out to Simon. “Take it!” she ordered.
Koris cried out and scrambled off the ledge. But Simon took it into his hand. At first touch the thing was as smooth and cold as any polished gem, then it began to warm, adding to that heat with every second. Yet the heat did not burn, it had no effect upon his flesh. Only the stone itself came to life; trails of opalescent fire crawled across its surface.
“I knew!” Her husky half-whisper filled the room. “No, not Kolder! Not Kolder; Kolder could not hold without harm, fire the Power and take no hurt! Welcome, brother in power!” Again she sketched a symbol in the air which glowed as brightly as the gem before it faded. Then she took the stone from his hold and restored it to its hiding place beneath her robe.
“He is a man. Shape changing could not work so, nor is it possible to befool us in the barracks where he has lived,” Koris spoke first. “And how does a man hold the Power?”
“He is a man out of our time and space. What chances in other worlds we cannot say. Now I will swear that he is not Kolder. So perhaps he is that which Kolder must face in the final battle. But now we must . . .”
Their preoccupation was sharply broken by the burr of a signal in the wall. Alert, Simon and Koris looked to the witch. Briant drew his gun. “The wall gate,” he said.
“Yet it is the right signal, though the wrong time. Answer it, but be prepared.”
He was already half out of the room. Koris and Simon sped after him to the garden door. As they reached outside, free from the deadening thickness of the walls of that unusual house, they heard a clamor from the town. Simon was plagued by a wisp of memory. There was a note in that far-off shouting which he had surely heard before. Koris looked startled.
“That is a mob! The snarl of a hunting mob.”
And Simon, remembering a red horror out of his own past, nodded briskly. He poised the dart gun to welcome whoever stood without the wall gate.
There was no mistaking the race of the man who stumbled in to them. A bloody gash could not disguise Estcarp features. He fell forward and Koris caught him about the body. Then they were all nearly rocked from their feet as a blast of sound and displaced air beat in on them and the very ground moved under them.
The man in Koris’ hold moved, smiled, tried to speak. Deafened momentarily they could not hear. Briant slammed shut the gate and set its locking bars. Together Simon and the Captain half carried, half supported the fugitive into the house.
He recovered enough to sketch a salute to the witch as they brought him to her. She measured some bluish liquid into a cup and held it to his lips as he drank.
“Lord Vortimer?”
He leaned back in the chair into which they had lowered him. “You just heard his passing, lady—in that thunder clap! With him went all of our blood fortunate to reach the embassy in time. For the rest—they are being hunted in the streets. Yvian has ordered the three times horning for all of Estcarp or of the old blood! He is like a man gone mad!”
“This too?” She pressed her hands tight against her temples as if she might so ease some almost intolerable pain. “We have no time, no time at all?”
“Vortimer sent me to warn you. Do you choose to follow him along the same path, lady?”
“Not yet.”
“Those who have been horned can be cut down without question wherever they are found. And in Kars today the cutting down does not come swiftly as a clean death,” he warned dispassionately. “I do not know what hopes you may have of the Lady Aldis—”
The witch laughed.”Aldis is no hope at all, Vortgin. Five of us . . .” She turned the cup around and around in her fingers and then looked directly to Simon. “More depends upon this than just our lives alone. There are those in the outer parts of Karsten of the old blood, who, warned, might safely get through the mountains to Estcarp, and so swell our ranks. Also what we have learned here, patchy though it is, must be taken back. I could not hope to summon power enough—you will have to aid me, brother!”
“But I don’t know how—I have no use of power,” he protested.
“You can back me. It is our only hope.” Koris came away from the window where he had been peering into the garden.
“Shape changing?”
“It is the only way.”
“And how long will it hold?”
She shrugged.
Vortgin ran his tongue across his lips. “Set me outside this cursed city and I’ll rouse your countryside for you. I have kin in the backlands who’ll move on my word!”
“Come!” She led the way to that tapestried room of magic. But just inside the door Koris halted.
“What I have been given I bear with me. Put on me no shape in which I cannot handle the gift of Volt.”
“I would call you lack-witted,” she flared back, “if I did not know the worth of that biter of yours. But it is not of human make and so may change shape also in illusion. We can only try. Now let us make ready, quickly!”
She pulled a strip of carpet from the floor as Simon and Koris shoved the chair and stool, bore the other things to the other end of the room. Stooping she traced lines with the jewel of power and those lines glowed faintly in the form of a five pointed star. A little defiantly Koris dropped his ax in the center of that.