“Well?” Simon asked.
“It is thus, lord. There was this ship. She was a coaster, but not of the usual order. Her men, they did not go ashore, though she was dock set for two days, maybe three. And they sent no cargo to the wharves, nor did they ride hold-filled when they came in. So we watched her, m’ mate and me. And we saw naught, save that she was so quiet. But when the fighting started in the city, then she came to life. The men, they take out their sculls and cast off. But so did a lot of others, so that was not so different. Only all the others they kept goin’ once they started—”
“And this ship did not?” Simon could not see the purpose, but he had confidence enough in the Sulcar captain’s recommendation to listen the tale out.
“Just to over stream—” The sailor nodded to the opposite bank of the river, keeping his eyes respectfully on the deck planking. “There they sat on their sculls while the rest of those on the run headed up river. Then there was this boat, a small skiff just drifting along—like lost from a tow. But they did some fast sculling to get it on the port side where it was hid. And it didn’t come out again. Only after that they were on the move, headin’ downstream instead of up.”
“And you thought that odd?” Simon prompted.
“Well, yes, seein’ as how your men were coming from that direction. O’ course most of them were ferried across the river by then and hittin’ the city. Maybe those others—they thought a try at gettin’ back down to the coast was better than headin’ inland on the river.”
“Picked someone up from the skiff,” Ingvald said.
“So it would seem,” Simon agreed. “But who? One of their own officers?”
“This skiff now,” the Sulcar captain took a hand in the questioning, “who did you see aboard her?”
“That’s what makes it so queer, sir. There weren’t nobody. Course we did have no seein’ glass on her, but all that showed above the gunnel was a piece of reed mat. There weren’t nobody rowing or even sittin’ up in her. Was they anybody on board, they was lyin’ flat.”
“Injured in the fighting?” Ingvald speculated.
“Or simply in hiding. So this ship then headed for the seacoast, down river?”
“Yes, lord. And that there’s queer, too—how she went, I mean. They was men standin’ to her sculls right enough—only they was like makin’ a play of it, just like the current was runnin’ so fast they didn’t need to do any more’n maybe just fend her off from some sandbank now and then. There’s a current here, sure, but not as strong as that. You need scullin’ if you want to make time and the wind’s in the wrong quarter—which it was then. But they was makin’ time—good time.”
The Sulcar captain looked across the bowed head of the seaman to Simon. “I do not know of any way save sculls or wind to move in the river,” he reported. “If a ship has such a method of travel, then that kind of ship I have not seen before, nor have any of my brothers. The wind and oars we know, but this is—magic!”
“But not of the Estcarpian kind,” Simon replied. “Captain, make signal to the seneschal’s ship. Then put me aboard her with this man also.”
“Well, Captain Osberic,” Koris turned to the Sulcar fleet commander when the story had been repeated to him, “is this a tale poured from some wine bottle, or could it be true?” That he wanted to believe that it was true, had already fitted it into his own quest, was apparent to them all.
“We know of no such vessel—that this man saw what he has told us, yes, that I believe. But there are ships which are not ours.”
“This was no submarine,” Simon pointed out.
“Perhaps not, but as they seem to copy now our shape-changing, perhaps Kolder might give another covering to a vessel as well. Perhaps in the confusion existing along the river while we were setting our men across, they took a chance on betraying their alienness to gain time they believed they needed.”
Koris slipped the haft of Volt’s gift up and down in his hand. “Down river to the sea, then to Yle.”
Only perhaps, Simon wanted to remind him. If the ship, small as it must have been to resemble the river craft, was really more than it seemed, it could be heading to Yle—or even overseas to the Kolder nest which lay no man knew where.
But Koris had already made up his mind. “The fastest ship you have, Osberic, our men for the sculls if need be. We’re going after.”
Only if the ship was ahead of them, it had made good use of its long head start. With night a wind came to fill the sail Osberic had set, and they slipped along at as smart a clip as any river vessel knew, not needing scull labor. Behind them the string of transports was nosing into the northern shore, to disembark the raiders who would ride for the border, leaving chaos behind them. Only Osberic’s chosen ship and two others with Sulcar crews pursued the river chase.
Simon had some hours of sleep, his cloak about him, the discomfort of Fulk’s mail still heavy on his limbs. They had rid themselves of their shape-changed disguises, but the borrowed weapons and clothing they still wore. His sleep was uneasy, full of dreams which fell to fragments each time he awoke, though he was plagued with the thought that they were important.
And at last he lay watching the stars, listening to the wind, and now and then the murmur of some Sulcar man on duty. Koris lay an arm’s length away and Simon thought that perhaps fatigue had struck at last and the seneschal slept.
Yle—and Kolder. There would be no turning Koris aside from Yle—short of putting him in bonds by force. Yet, there was taking Yle either. Had they not bitten again and again on that hard nut these past months? They had won into Gorm because chance had taken Simon as a prisoner into that stronghold and made him aware of certain chinks in Kolder armor. But then Kolder had been confident, almost contemptuous of its opponents with their vulnerability to Kolder might.
The enemies’ defeat in Sippar would have taught them a lesson. Had in this much—that there was now an invisible barrier about Yle by both land and sea—a barrier nothing, not even the power of the witch probe, could pass. For months Yle had been sealed. If the garrison of that stronghold came or went, it was by sea, and not on the surface of that sea. The Kolder ships were submarines, three such had been taken at Gorm. But—
Simon knew again the doubts which had moved him months earlier when he had stood before the Council of Guardians and had given the opinion they had asked for: leave the things found at Gorm alone, be very careful of the alien secrets lest they unleash something they could neither understand nor control. Had he been wrong then? He wavered now. Yet something inside him still argued firmly that he was right, to use Kolder means was to deliver oneself in part to the enemy.
That the witches were exploring the finds on Gorm slowly, carefully, Simon knew. And that did not disturb him, for they would use every possible safeguard, and their own power was a barrier which Kolder recognized. But to put into the hands of others those machines . . .
Yet they might have a way there of breaching Yle now. Simon had thought of it before, but never, not even to Jaelithe, had he put that thought into words.
It might be that he alone could once more crack the shell of a Kolder fortress. Not via submarine—he had not the knowledge for that, and they had not yet discovered what motive force propelled those ships, unless it could be the mental power of the Kolder leader who had died with the metal cap on his head, failing his men at the last. No, not under the sea, but through the air. Those flyers lined up on the roof top in dead Sippar—they might be the key to Yle. But to mention that to Koris would be the rankest folly.
* * *
* * *
8 PRINT OF KOLDER
“IT IS LOCKED tight—” The curved blade of Volt’s gift bit into the thick green turf viciously as Koris would have used it against the enemy. They stood on the heights looking across the seaward valley to Yle.
Gorm had been ravaged from the people of this time and world. But in Yle the Kolder had built on their own. One would, Simon thought, have expected them to raise towers and walls of metal. But they had used the stone common to Estcarpian architecture, the only difference being that buildings throughout the witch land were old, old with the seeming of having been born from the very bones and flesh of the earth which based them, rather than built by men. And this Yle, for all its archaic stone, was new. Not only new, but divorced from the soil and rock about it in a way Simon could feel, but not put into words. He believed that even if he had not known that this was a Kolder hold, he would have realized that it was not of Estcarp or any neighbor nation.