High Sorcery (3 page)

And Craike, who had believed that he could never hate more than he had when he had been touched by the fawning
“hound” of the mob, was filled with a rage tempered into a chill of steel determination.

The girl went to her knees, still clutching her hair about her, facing her tormentors with her still-held defiance. Now the man who had wrought the magic which had drawn her there crawled, all humanity gone out of him, wriggling on his belly back to his captors.

Two of the guards jerked him up. He hung limp in their hands, his mouth open in an idiot's grin. Callously, as he might tread upon a worm, the nearest Black Hood waved a hand. A metal ax flashed, and there came the dull sound of cracking bone. The guards pitched the body from them so that the bloodied head almost touched the girl.

She writhed a last frenzied attempt to break the force which pinned her. Without haste the guards advanced. One caught at her hair, pulling it tautly from her head.

Craike shivered. The thrill of her agony reached him. This was what she feared most and had fought so long to prevent. If ever, he must move now. And that part of his brain which had been feverishly seeking a plan went into action.

Ponies pawed, reared and went wild with panic. One of the Black Hoods swung around to face the terrorized animals. But his own mount struck out with teeth and hooves. Guardsmen shouted, and above their cries arose the shrill squeals of the animals.

Craike stood his ground, keeping the ponies in terror-stricken revolt. The guard who held the handful of hair slashed at the tress with a knife, severing it at a palm's distance away from her head. But in the same moment she moved. The knife leaped free from the man's grasp, while the severed hair twined itself about his hands, binding them until the blade buried itself in his throat and he went down.

One of the Black Hoods was also finished, tramped into a feebly squirming thing by the ponies. Then from the ground burst a sheet of flame which split into balls, drifting through the air or rolling along the earth.

The Esper wet his lips; that was not his doing. He did not have to feed the panic of the animals now; they were truly mad. The girl was on her feet. Before his thought could reach her she was gone, swallowed up in a mist which arose to blanket the fire balls. Once more she cut their contact; there was a blank void where she had been.

Now the fog thickened. Through it came one of the
ponies, foam dripping from its blunt muzzle. It bore down on Craike, eyes gleaming red through a tangled forelock. With a scream it reared.

Craike's hand grabbed a handful of mane as he leaped, avoiding teeth and hooves. Then, somehow, he gained the pad saddle, locking his fingers in the coarse hair, striving to hold his seat against the bucking, enraged beast. It broke into a run, and the Esper plastered himself to the heaving body. For the moment he made no attempt at mind control.

Behind, the Black Hoods came out of their stunned bewilderment. They were questing feverishly, and he had to concentrate on holding his shield against them. A pony fleeing in terror would not excite them; a pony under control would provide them with a target.

Later he could circle about and try to pick up the trail of the witch girl. Flushed with success, Craike was sure he could provide her with a rear guard no Black Hood could pass.

The fog was thick, and the pace of the pony began to slacken. Once or twice it bucked half-heartedly, giving up when it could not dislodge its rider. Craike drew his fingers in slow, soothing sweeps down the sweating curve of its neck.

There were no more trees about, and the unshod hooves pounded on sand. They were in a dried water course, and Craike did not try to turn from that path. Then his luck ran out.

What he had ignorantly supposed to be a rock ahead, heaved up seven feet or more. A red mouth opened in a great roar. He had believed the bear he had seen fleeing the fire to be a giant, but this one was a nightmare monster.

The pony screamed with an almost human note of despair and whirled. Craike gripped the mane and tried to mind control the bear. But his surprise had lasted seconds too long. A vast clawed paw struck, ripping across pony hide and human thigh. Then Craike could only cling to the running mount.

How long he was able to keep his seat he never knew. Then he slipped; there was a throb of pain as he struck the ground; it was followed by blackness.

It was dusk when he opened his eyes, fighting agony in his head and his leg. But later there was moonlight. And that silver-white spotlighted a waiting shape. Green slits of eyes regarded him remotely. Dizzily he made contact.

A wolf, hungry, yet with a wariness which recognized in the prone man an enemy. Craike fought for control. The wolf whined. Then it arose, its prick ears sharp-cut in the moonlight, its nose questing for the scent of other, less disturbing prey; and it was gone.

Craike edged up against a boulder and sorted out sounds. There was a rush of water. He moved a paper-dry tongue over cracked lips. There would be water to drink, to wash his wounds, water!

With a groan Craike worked his way to his feet, holding fast to the top of the rock when his torn leg threatened to buckle under him. The same inner drive which had kept him going through the desert brought him down to the river.

By sunrise he was seeking a shelter, wanting to lie up, as might the wolf, in some secret cave until his wounds healed. All chance of finding the witch girl was lost. But as he crawled along the shingle, leaning on a staff he had found in drift wood, he kept alert for any trace of the Black Hoods.

It was mid-morning on the second day that his snail's progress brought him to the river towers; and it took another hour for him to reach the terrace. Gaunt and worn, his empty stomach complaining, he wanted nothing more than to sink down in the nest of grass he had gathered and cease to struggle.

Perhaps he might have done so had not a click-clack of sound from the river put him on the defensive; his staff was now a club. These were not Black Hoods, but farmers, local men bound for the market of Sampur with products from their fields. They had paused and were making a choice among the least appetizing of their wares for a tribute to be offered to the tower demon.

Craike hitched stiffly to a point where he could witness that sacrifice. But when he assessed the contents of their dugout, the heaping basket piled between the paddlers, his hunger took command.

Fob off a demon with a handful of meal and a too-ripe melon would they? There were three haunches of cured meat and other stuff on board.

Craike voiced a roar which could have done credit to the red bear, a roar which altered into a demand for meat. The paddlers nearly lost control of their crude craft. But one reached for a haunch and threw it blindly on the refuse-covered rock, while his companion added a basket of small cakes into the bargain.

“Enough, little men,” Craike's voice boomed hollowly. “You may pass free.”

They needed no urging; they did not look at those threatening towers as their paddles bit into the water, adding impetus to the pull of the current.

Craike watched them well out of sight before he made a slow descent to the rock. The effort he was forced to expend warned him that a second such trip might be impossible, and he inched back to the terrace dragging both meat and cakes.

The cured haunch he worried into strips, using his pocket knife. It was tough, not too pleasant to the taste and unsalted. But he found it more appetizing than the cakes of baked meal. With this supply he could afford to lie up and favor his leg.

About the claw rents the flesh was red and puffed. Craike had no dressing but river water and the leaves he had tied over the tears. Sampur was beyond his power to reach, and to contact men traveling on the river would only bring the Black Hoods.

He lay in his grass nest and tried to sort out the events of the past few days. This was a land in which Esper powers were allowed free range. He had no idea of how he had come here, but it seemed to his feverish mind that he had been granted another chance—one in which the scales of justice were more balanced in his favor. If he could only find the girl, learn from her—

Tentatively, without real hope, he sent out a questing thought. Nothing. He moved impatiently, wrenching his leg, so that his head swam with pain. His throat and mouth were dry. The lap of water sounded in his ears. He was thirsty again, but he could not crawl down slope and up once more. Craike closed his eyes wearily.

V

Craike's memory of the hours which followed thereafter was dim.
Had
he seen a demon in the doorway? A slavering wolf? A red bear?

Then the girl sat there, cross-legged as he had seen her on the mesa, her cloak of hair about her. A hand emerged from the cloak to lay wood on the fire. Illusions?

But would an illusion turn to him, put firm, cool fingers upon his wound, somehow driving out by touch the pain and
fire which burned there? Would an illusion raise his head, cradling it against her so that the soft silk of her hair lay against his cheek and throat, urging on him liquid out of a crude bowl? Would an illusion sing softly to herself while she drew a fish-bone comb back and forth through her hair, until the song and the sweep of the comb lulled him into a sleep so deep that no dream walked there?

He awoke clear headed. Yet that last illusion lingered. She came from the sun-drenched world without, a bowl of fruit in her hand. For a long moment she stood gazing at him searchingly. But when he tried mind contact, he met that wall. It was not unheeding, but a refusal to answer.

Her hair was now braided. But about her face the lock which the guardsman had shorn made an untidy fringe. Around her thin body was a strip of hide, purposefully arranged to mask all femininity.

“So,” Craike spoke rustily, “you are real.”

She did not smile. “I am real. You no longer dream with fever.”

“Who are you?” He asked the first of his long hoarded questions.

“I am Takya.” She added nothing to that.

“You are Takya, and you are a witch.”

“I am Takya, and I have the power.” It was an assertion of fact rather than agreement.

She settled in her favorite cross-legged position, selected a fruit from her bowl and examined it with the interest of a housewife who has shopped for supplies on a limited budget. Then she placed it in his hand before she chose another for herself. He bit into the plumlike globe. If she would only drop her barrier, let him communicate in the way which was fuller and deeper than speech.

“You also have the power.”

Craike decided to be no more communicative than she. He replied to that with a curt nod.

“Yet you have not been horned.”

“Not as you have been. But in my own world, yes.”

“Your world?” Her eyes held some of the feral glow of a hunting cat's. “What world, and why were you horned there, man of sand and ash power?”

Without knowing why Craike related the events of the days past. Takya listened, he was certain, with more than ears alone. She picked up a stick from the pile of firewood and drew patterns in the sand and ash, patterns which had something to do with her listening.

“Your power was great enough to break a world wall.” She snapped the stick between two fingers, threw it into the flames.

“A world wall?”

“We of the power have long known that different worlds lie together in such a fashion.” She held up her hand with the fingers tight lying one to another. “Sometimes there comes a moment when two touch so closely that the power can carry one through, if at that moment there is a desperate need for escape. But those places of meeting cannot be readily found, and the moment of their touch can lay only for an instant. Have you in your world no reports of men and women who have vanished almost in sight of their fellows?”

Remembering old tales, he nodded.

“I have seen a summoning from another world,” she continued with a shiver, running both hands down the length of her braids as if so she evoked a shield for both mind and body. “To summon so is a great evil, for no man can hold in check the power of something alien. You broke the will of the Black Hoods when I was a beast running from their hunt. When I made the serpent to warn you off, you changed it: into a fox. And when the Black Hoods would have shorn my power—” she looped the braids about her wrists, caressing, treasuring them against her small breasts, “again you broke their hold and set me free for a second time. But this you could not have done had you been born into this world, for our power must follow set laws. Yours lies outside our patterns and can cut across those laws, even as the knife cut this.” She touched the rough patch of hair at her temple.

“Follow patterns? Then it was those patterns in stone which drew you down from the mesa?”

“Yes. Takyi, my womb brother, whom they slew there, was blood of my blood, bone of my bone. When they crushed him, then they could use him to draw me, and I could not resist. But in the slaying of his husk they freed me, to their great torment as Tousuth shall discover in time.”

“Tell me of this country. Who are the Black Hoods and why did they horn you? Are you not of their breed since you have the power?”

But Tayka did not answer at once in words. Nor did she, as he had hoped, lower her mind barrier.

Her fingers now held one long hair she had pulled from her head, and this she began to weave in and out, swiftly, intricately, in a complicated series of loops and crossed
strands. After a moment Craike did not see the white fingers, nor the black hair they passed in loops from one to another. Rather did he see the pictures she wrought in her weaving.

There was a wide land, largely wilderness. The impressions he had gathered from Kaluf and the traders crystallized into vivid life. Small holdings here and there were ruled by petty lords; new settlements were carved out by a scattered people moving up from the south in great wheeled wains, bringing flocks and herds and their carefully treasured seed. They stopped here and there for a season to sow and reap, until they decided upon a site for their final rooting. Tiny city-states were protected by the Black Hoods, the Espers who purposefully interbred their own gifted stock, keeping their children apart.