When it came a little lower I saw it was a chain ladder such as had been in use in the transport cavern. And, as it touched full upon the platform, my mother’s mind send reached me.
“Up, and speedily!”
“Ayllia—” First I turned my mind control on her. She rose and went to the ladder without question, began to climb.
“Well enough!” my mother applauded. “Now, hold to the adept.”
That I was already doing, but now I felt that inflow and outflow. This time it was not my own strength being so drained, but that which came from the two aloft. Hilarion struggled out of my hold, got slowly to his feet.
“The ladder—” I guided him to it. But once his hands closed on it he took on new life and, as Ayllia, he climbed, steadily, if more slowly than my impatience wanted to see him go.
As soon as he was well above my head I put my own feet and hands to use. I could only trust that the chain would support the weight of the three of us at once, for Ayllia, though continuing to move, was still well below the rim.
“Hold well!” My mother’s command came for the third time and I held. Now the ladder moved under me, not me over it, as if that tough but slender strand to which we all clung was being hoisted.
There sounded a grating noise from below. I looked down, startled, at the shadow which was the platform. Surely we were not ascending that swiftly? No, the platform was sinking, down into the depths where Zandur’s forces doubtlessly waited. We had left it just in time.
Up and up we went. I soon found it better not to look up, and surely not down, but to cling as tightly as I could to that swinging support and hope it would hold for time that was a measurement to lessen my fear. Thus it was that we came at last, one by one, into a gray and clouded day.
And for the first time in so long I looked upon those two from whose union I had come. My mother was as she had appeared in my mind picture, but Simon of Tregarth was so long lost in the past I had half forgotten him. He was there beside her, his head bare of helm, but about his shoulders the mail of Estcarp. He, too, had not aged beyond early middle life, yet there was a thin veil over his features which could be read as much weariness and endurance under great and punishing odds. He had the black hair of the Old Race, but his features were not the regular ones of inbreeding you saw in those men, being blunter, a little heavier. And his eyes were strange—to me—startling when he opened them wide to look intently upon one. As he did at me now.
It was a constrained meeting between the three of us. Though these were my mother and father, as a child I had never been close to either. Caught up as they had been in the duties of border guardians, they had spent little time with us. Then, too, our triple birth had prostrated our mother for a long time, and, Kemoc had once said, that had earned us our father’s dislike. Therefore, while our mother lay fingering the final curtain, not sure whether or not she would lift it to go beyond, he had not been able to look upon us at all.
Anghart of the Falconers had been our mother by care, not Jaelithe Tregarth. So that now I felt strange and removed from these, not racing to open my heart and my arms to embrace them.
But it would seem that it was not in their minds to make such gestures either, or so I then thought. My father raised one hand in a kind of salute, which straightaway altered into a gesture beckoning us all on to where stood one of those crawling machines which I had seen moving toward the towers.
“In!” he urged us, stopping only to coil together the ladder and carry it over his shoulder as he shepherded us before him. There was a door gaping in the side of the box and we scrambled in.
The interior was indeed cramped quarters. My father slammed the door and pushed past us to take his seat at the front behind such a bank of levers as I had seen under the screens below. There was a second place to his right, and in that my mother settled. But she turned halfway around to face the three of us where we sat upon the floor.
“We must get away fast,” she said. “Kaththea, and you, Hilarion, link with me. It will be necessary to maintain the best illusion we can lest we pull pursuit after us before we dare to turn and fight.”
In the half-light of that small chamber I saw Hilarion nod. Then he gripped his wand by one end, allowed the other to touch the back of Jaelithe’s seat. His left hand he put across Ayllia to me and I grasped it.
As we had linked, Simon, Jaelithe and I, so now did the four of us combine when my mother put the fingers of one hand on my father’s arm. And our minds came together with one purpose, though for Hilarion and myself it was merely a lending of thought force to be molded and used by those other two as they saw best. I do not know what they wrought outside our crawling box, but at least no attack came. I guessed that perhaps they had chosen to produce a simulation of our machine headed in another direction.
There was a screen set before the two seats at the front, and on this appeared a picture of the basin over which we traveled, so that while the window slits were too narrow to see through, the outer world was thus made plain to us.
I had been so intent upon what lay before me when I had tracked Ayllia hither that I had not noted much of the country. But I could see on the screen the crunched tracks of the transports that had gone out from the well and returned to it. We soon veered from that course, heading at an angle over ground which was not so marked. Would we not then leave tracks doubly easy to follow? One part of my brain questioned as I bent my energy to supplying what was needed for the weaving of the hallucination.
My father had a reputation for being a wily and resourceful fighter, a leader of forlorn hopes which usually ended in success, as he had gone up against the Kolder to bring an end to them. One must have confidence now that he knew what he was doing, even though it seemed errant folly to the onlooker.
Ayllia had lapsed into the same sleep or loss of consciousness which had held her in the underground, lying inert between Hilarion and myself. The adept sat with his back against the wall of the cabin. His eyes were closed and there were signs of strain on his face, even as they were painted upon my father’s. But his hold upon the wand, his grip on my hand, were firm and steady.
That we could depend upon his aid as long as we were in this haunted land I was certain, for failure would mean an even worse fate for him if we were taken. But what if he did activate the gate again and we won back into Escore? Could it be that his return would then bring upon my brothers and the people of the Valley such danger as they could not stand against?
I had no globe of crystal for foreseeing, nor had I Utta’s board to summon the possible future—for no one can see the future exactly so and say this and this shall be. There are many factors which can change, so one can see a possible future and perhaps alter it thereafter by some action of one’s own.
But I determined that I must speak in private with my mother, not trusting mind speech, which Hilarion could easily tap. And I would beg her aid and that of my father to make sure we did not bring new danger through the gate—always supposing that Hilarion could find and unlock it once more for us. I did not believe that I could find the place where we first burst into this world (unless by some concentration it could be traced by a mind search—such troublings of the fabric of time and space ought to leave a “scent” which the talented could perceive).
It was not an easy ride in that box, for once we crept from the basin there was a jolting, a slipping, a sickening up and down swing of the floor under us. Meanwhile, we were deafened by a throb which marked the life of the thing, and the acrid air of this world was rendered even worse to our nostrils by fumes which gathered in our close quarters. But all these discomforts we had to ignore, concentrating only on supplying the energy necessary to provide our flight with what cover we managed to maintain.