“Faltjar of the southern gate,” Koris identified their leader. He swept his own helm from his head to display his face plainly in the fading light. “I am Koris of Estcarp, and I ride with Simon of the Guards.”
“Also with a female!” The return was cold and the falcon on Faltjar’s saddle perch shook its wings and screamed.
“A lady of Estcarp whom I must put safely beyond the mountains,” corrected the Captain in a tone as cold and with the sharpness of a rebuke. “We make no claim upon you for shelter, but there is news which your Lord of Wings should hear.”
“A way through the mountains you may have, Guard of Estcarp. And the news you may give to me; it shall be retold to the Lord of Wings before moonrise. But in your hail you spoke of ill here and worse to follow. That I must know, for it is my duty to man the southern slopes. Does Karsten send forth her men?”
“Karsten has thrice horned all of the old race and they flee for their lives. But also there is something else. Simon, show him the false hawk.”
Simon was reluctant. He did not want to yield up that machine until he had more time to examine it. The mountaineer looked upon the broken bird he took from the saddlebag, smoothing a wing with one finger, touching an open eye of crystal, pulling aside a shred of feathered skin to see the metal beneath.
“This flew?” he demanded at last, as if he could not believe in what he saw and felt.
“It flew as one of your birds, and kept watch upon us after the fashion of your scouts and messengers.”
Faltjar drew his forefinger caressingly down the head of his own bird as if to assure himself that it was a living creature and not such a copy.
“Truly this is a great ill. You must speak yourself with the Lord of Wings!” Clearly he was torn between the age-old customs of his people and the necessity for immediate action. “If you did not have the female—the lady,” he corrected with an effort, “but she may not enter the Eyrie.”
The witch spoke. “Let me camp with Briant, and you ride to the Eyrie, Captain. Though I say to you, bird man, the day comes soon when we must throw aside many old customs, both we of Estcarp and you of the mountains, for it is better to be alive and able to fight, than to be bound by the chains of prejudice and dead! There is a riving of the border before us such as this land has never seen. And all men of good will must stand together.”
He did not look at her, nor answer, though he half sketched a salute, giving the impression that that was a vast concession. And then his hawk took to the air with a cry, and Faltjar spoke directly to Koris.
“The camp shall be made in a safe place. Then, let us ride!”
* * *
* * *
PART IV: VENTURE OF GORM
I
THE RIVING OF THE BORDER
A column of smoke penciled into the air, broken by puffs as more combustible materials caught. Simon reined up on the rise to gaze back at the site of another disaster for the Karsten forces, another victory for his own small, hard-riding, tough-punching troop. How long their luck would hold, none of them could guess. But as long as it did, they would continue to blast into the plains, covering up the escape lines of those set-faced, dark-haired people from the outlands who came in family groups, in well armed and equipped bodies, or singly at a weaving pace dictated by wounds and exhaustion. Vortgin had done his work well. The old race, or what was left of it, was withdrawing over a border the Falconers kept open, into Estcarp.
Men without responsibilities for families or clans, men who had excellent cause to want to meet Karsten levies with naked blades, stayed in the mountains, providing a growing force to be led by Koris and Simon. Then by Simon alone, as the Captain of the Guard was summoned north to Estcarp to recommand there.
This was guerilla warfare as Simon had learned it in another time and land, doubly effective this time because the men under him knew the country as those sent gainst them did not. For Tregarth discovered that these silent, somber men who rode at his back had a queer affinity with the land itself and with the beasts and the birds. Perhaps they were not served as the Falconers were by their trained hawks, but he had seen odd things happen, such as a herd of deer move to muddle horse tracks, crows betray a Karsten ambush. Now he listened, believed, and consulted with his sergeants before any strike.
The old race were not bred to war, though they handled sword and gun expertly. But with them it was a disagreeable task to be quickly done and forgotten. They killed cleanly with dispatch and they were incapable of such beastliness as the parties from the mountains had come upon where fugitives had been cut off and captured.
It was once when Simon left such a site, white, controlling his sickness by will power alone, that he was startled by a comment from the set-faced young man who had been his lieutenant on that foray.
“They do not do this of their own planning.”
“I have seen such things before,” Simon returned, “and that was also done by human beings to human beings.”
The other who had held his own lands in the back country and had escaped with his bare life from that holding some thirty days earlier, shook his head.
“Yvian is a soldier, a mercenary. War is his trade. But to kill in such ways is to sow black hate against a future reaping. And Yvian is lord in this land; he would not willingly rip apart his own holding and bring it to ruin—he is too keen-witted a man. He would not give orders for the doing of such deeds.”
“Yet we have seen more than one such sight. They could not all be the work of only one band commanded by a sadist, or even two such.”
“True. That is why I think we now fight men who are possessed.”
Possessed! The old meaning of that term in his own world came to Simon—possession by demons. Well, that a man could believe having seen what they had been forced to look upon. Possessed by demons—or—the memory of the Sulcarkeep road flooded into his mind; possessed by a demon—or emptied of a soul! Kolder again?
From then on, much as it revolted him, Simon kept records of such finds, though never was he able to catch the perpetrators at their grisly work. He longed to consult with the witch, only she had gone north with Briant and the first wave of fugitives.
He launched through the network of guerrilla bands a request for information. And at nights, in one temporary headquarters after another, he pieced together bits and patches. There was very little concrete evidence, but Simon became convinced that certain commanders among the Karsten forces did not operate according to their former ways, and that the Duke’s army had been infiltrated by an alien group.
Aliens! As always that puzzle of inequality of skills continued to plague him. Questioning of his refugees told him that the energy machines which they had always known had come from “overseas” ages past: “overseas” energy machines brought by the Sulcar traders, adapted by the old race for heat and light, the Falconers also from “overseas” with their amazing communicators borne by their hawks. And the source of the Kolder was also “overseas”—a vague term—a common source for all?
What he could learn he dispatched by messenger to Estcarp, asking for anything the witches might have to tell in return. The only thing he was sure of was that as long as his own force was recruited from those of old race, he had no need to fear infiltration himself, for that quality which gave them kinship with the land and the wild things granted them in addition the ability to smell out the alien.
Three more false hawks had been detected in the mountains. But all had been destroyed in their capture and Simon had only broken bits to examine. Where they came from and for what purpose they had been loosed was a part of all the other mystery.
Ingvald, the Karstenian lieutenant, pushed up beside him now to look down upon the scene of destruction they had left.
“The main party with the booty is well along the hill track. Captain. We have plundered to some purpose this time, and with that fire laid to cross our trail, they will not even know how much has come into our hands! There are four cases of darts as well as the food.”