by Andre Norton
The senior Witch surveyed Nolar's father with controlled scorn. “Those who invest according to rumors may find that their gold has vanished overnight. You would do well to base your judgments on more reliable facts. The Council, I assure you, is prepared to deal with Pagar. It is convening at Es Castle shortly for that very purpose. Arid now we must retire, for we shall depart early on the morrow.”
Nolar quietly retreated to her room. Her mountain clothes lay neatly folded on a low chest. She touched one familiar, rough-woven sleeve, wishing that she could be back in her own house, when she heard a faint scratching at her door. To her complete surprise, the impatient figure waiting in the hall was the half-blind Witch, who strode decisively into Nolar's room, shutting the door behind her.
“I must speak with you,” the Witch said, so quietly that Nolar had to lean closer to distinguish the words. “There will be no opportunity tomorrow; it must be now. Pay heed to me: you must travel to Lormt!”
Nolar supposed she must have looked as stunned as she felt. At first speechless, she recovered enough to say, “Lormt—but until you spoke the name a few minutes ago, I had not heard it since the old scholar came to take Ostbor's records there.”
The Witch had nodded. “Good—then you are at least aware of the place. So few recognize the value of preserving ancient lore. You heard the opinion of the Council member; I am sorry to say that she speaks for most Witches on the subject of Lormt. Still, despite their low opinion, Lormt is a storehouse of old knowledge to be found nowhere else, and you must travel there. I cannot convey to you my sense of urgency on this matter, but you must believe me. Lormt holds that which you alone can find … must find.”
Nolar was convinced of the Witch's sincerity, but all that flooded her mind were more questions. “But, lady, what am I to seek? How am I to get there? Who would listen to me? I know no one at Lormt, nor the way to the place. Ostbor studied there many years ago, but he was too old to attempt the journey with me when I asked him to take me there.”
The Witch remained still, except for her fingers twisting nervously around the boss of her staff. The silver bird crafted there was definitely a raven; it was a clear miniature of those stately birds Nolar had often seen in the high peaks. Nolar suddenly realized that the twisting fingers had to evidence uncharacteristic agitation for a Witch.
This Witch's severe frown appeared to reflect her own inner disquiet. “I cannot tell you exactly where to go,” she admitted. “The how is a simple, practical matter of hiring a guide who will arrange for horses and such—you may dismiss that. The troubling point is the object of your quest. It is not clear to me at all.” Frustrated, the Witch had thumped her staff on the floor, and was instantly dismayed by the noise. Fortunately, the household had remained undisturbed. The Witch hurried on. “Our time is short—hear me well. We are sometimes granted a Foreseeing, a vision of what is to come. Three times I have seen you—there was no chance for mistake, for you are the one in my vision. And Lormt is the place; I am certain of that.” She had compressed her lips, then sighed. “Mist, fog—all else is concealed from me, but I know that you must go to Lormt and seek. Never before have I had such a powerful Foreseeing. Now I must go. Perhaps we may meet again. I sense that we are somehow linked together. I do not know how or why … but I wish you well. For the future, all good.”
Deeply impressed by the Witch's evident concern, Nolar tried an awkward bow. “My thanks, lady, for your telling of this Foreseeing. I do not know where my path shall lead, but if ever I should go to Lormt, I shall recall your words.”
The Witch hesitated at the door. “I can do no more. Remember—you must go to Lormt and search there.” With a swirl of her gray robes, she hastened down the hall, not looking back.
Nolar lay awake for many hours, puzzling over the incidents of the day. She swiftly dismissed the effort by her father to arrange her marriage. So long as she bore her own face, she thought, she was likely safe from that threat. Her father was both too practical and too proud to risk further ridicule and additional rebuffs. This one failed effort would probably be his last … unless, a nettlesome thought nagged, some other family was afflicted with a similarly unsuitable son it could not place. She shook her head, then stopped, aggravated by the unfamiliar softness of the pillow.
She knew that she did not belong in this place—she never had. The sooner she could return to the solitude of the mountains, the better. Resolving to ask her father in the morning for his leave to depart, she then reviewed her meetings with the Witches. Ostbor had been right. There was no tie of kinship left to the woman who was her great-aunt. Having become a Witch, she had cut all ties to her family, and now she had to be thought of solely as a Witch, and an important Witch at that. Nolar did not know what to think of the half-blind Witch who had visited her room. There was a quiet warmth about her that made Nolar think of Ostbor, the only other person who had ever truly cared for her. If family members were supposed to care about each other's well-being, then this complete stranger—and Witch—seemed far more like a family member than did her blood relatives. But Witches were not supposed to have family feelings once they took the gray robe.
It was like a knot without a loose cord to pull, yet Nolar was unable to ignore what the half-blind Witch had said and how she had said it. Why should Nolar have appeared in the Witch's vision? And how could she possibly be linked with anything in distant Lormt? A little of her old desire to see Lormt stirred in her mind, but Nolar told herself that it was all foolishness. The only place that she belonged was in the mountains, away from most scornful eyes. Curiously, her last thought before she had dropped off into troubled sleep was of the silver raven perched on the Witch's staff.
The next day began in a bustle of activity. The two Witches rode away just before dawn. More guests had arrived for the betrothal. Nolar had to wait until midmorning to see her father, but he was distracted, and seemed not to care whether she stayed or left. Nolar seized her opportunity, asking the same servant who had escorted her if he would see to her horse for the return trip to the mountains. Her packing required little time, and before midday, she rode quietly out of the busy courtyard.
Ostbor's cramped, eccentric house seemed a welcome refuge when Nolar wearily descended the last slope down to its door. She opened all of the windows that would open, and breathed the pine-scented air with relief, after all the dust from the road during her trip.
During the succeeding days, she slipped back into her former life pattern, gathering herbs, roots, leaves, and stems to be prepared in many ways for use by any hill folk who would ask for them. In the still night hours, Nolar searched through all of Ostbor's remaining scrolls for any information on the Witches and their ways. As Ostbor had told her, the Witches kept very much to themselves, so what was written about them appeared to be more conjecture and rumor than likely fact. Still, what little she found only added to Nolar's unease. The senior Witch had said that Nolar might have found a place with them in spite of her disfigurement, provided that she had shown talent.
It must, Nolar thought, be a great encouragement to feel that one truly belonged to some group, whether it was one's family or even the company of Witches. In her case, of course, the door to her family had been closed to Nolar from the very first. Nolar decided that notwithstanding the totally unexplained feeling of kindness that she had sensed from the half-blind Witch, life among the Witches must be coldly austere, submerging the individual into the group in some mysterious way that seemed to her basically threatening. She renewed her resolve to avoid all Witches in the future, if possible, although she occasionally surprised herself by wishing that she might someday again meet the Witch with the silver raven on her staff.
There had been no further word from or about Lormt. In thinking back to the senior Witch's remarks at her father's house, Nolar wondered if there could be some connection between them and the traveling merchant's speculations about a trap for Duke Pagar. Nolar had a foreboding sense that events were about to break up
on Estcarp just as sea waves were said to crash against the coastal beaches. She had never seen the sea, but Ostbor had read her tales of the wreckers of Verlaine and the fabled merchants and fighters of Sulcar. If the Sulcarmen were indeed planning to help those of Estcarp to escape by ship when Pagar invaded, surely Nolar and the hill folk would be secure so far away nestled against these interior mountains. Even as she thought that, however, Nolar knew that Karsten's forces would not stop at the Es River, nor at the great walls of Es Castle. If Estcarp were to be attacked in earnest, Alizon to the north would not sit idly on its hands. But the south—Nolar's thoughts had kept turning to the south, to Lormt. She was irritated by that repeated intrusion, and vowed not to let herself be manipulated by outside pressure.
Pressure—the very word seemed to vibrate in the breathless air. There was a certain morbid irony, Nolar reflected, in her sense today of some essential wrongness. Except for Ostbor's quiet companionship, she had never felt comfortable in the company of other people. Now it seemed that the whole natural world had become somehow misaligned. How else could she account for the silent oppression that battered her from the south? It was from the south … but not, Nolar was abruptly certain, from Lormt itself. The merchant's words sounded again in her mind. “The Council is plotting some elaborate trap to swallow the Duke of Karsten and all his harrying forces.” Nolar suddenly knew that whatever was wrong was related to the Witches. They had to be behind it, this draining away of all vitality. If the Council were drawing upon the energy of the very land of Estcarp, then what devastation must result when they loosed that fearful accumulation?
With the twilight darkening to dusk, Nolar shivered, as much from her daunting thoughts as from the penetrating cold. There would be no visible sunset this night; the dense southern clouds had blotted out the usual channels through which the sun's last rays ordinarily shone. Nolar stepped into the house only long enough to snatch up a woven shawl, then hurried back outside. Her feeling of urgent anticipation drove her to scramble up a nearby hill where she could gain a better view toward the south. Something, she knew, something dreadful was about to happen.
Alert and expectant as she was, Nolar still recoiled, startled, when a blaze of light erupted from the brooding darkness across the horizon. She caught herself unconsciously holding her breath, her hands clenched until the nails bit into her palms. She tried to relax, but another enormous flash of light, far brighter than any lightning Nolar could remember, flared against the black clouds. It had to be countless leagues away, but Nolar strained to hear the thunder that must accompany so gigantic a display. The minutes crawled by, and to her amazement, the first physical sign of the distant catastrophe resonated through the rocks against Nolar's feet. The initial movement was tentative, then more pronounced.
During her years in the mountains, Nolar had experienced a few minor quakings of the earth, which had always passed quickly with little damage, except for crockery tumbled from shelves. This deep, horrid shuddering seemed to emanate from the very roots of the mountains. Clutching her shawl, Nolar dropped to her knees. The ground shook ponderously, reluctantly, as if responding to irresistible pressures from some distance away. Sound—she could barely distinguish the sound that must be deafening to any living creature unfortunate enough to be trapped near its source. It was a low-pitched, drawn-out, grumbling, grinding sound that vibrated into the bones of the hearer.
Nolar clung desperately to her suddenly precarious position. What were the Witches doing? Was it possible that they were somehow responsible for this earthquake? The question seemed so absurd that Nolar thrust it aside, but the suggestion echoed in her mind, numbing in its awful enormity.
As she grasped the quivering rocks, Nolar tried to distract herself. Ignore the Witches, she thought, but unbidden, the image of the half-blind Witch who had urged her to go to Lormt suddenly crystallized in Nolar's mind's eye. Instantly, as if she had accidentally touched the hidden spring releasing a secret door, a spate of images and voices flooded into her mind, drowning out all other thoughts. Terrified, Nolar cried out and pressed to her forehead the only hand she could spare. Pain—pain—pressure—Power! The mind-realm crackled with Power. Nolar's eyes were squeezed shut, but she was seeing, seeing things and places that she had never before seen. She was allowed no time to be frightened; indeed, she scarcely had time to breathe.
The highest Nolar had ever climbed had been dangerously near the swaying tip of an evergreen tree near Ostbor's house. He had wondered whether the seed cones near the top were of the same form as those closer to the ground, so the young Nolar had immediately rushed to find out for him. She had returned much later, breathless, her skin scraped by the rough bark and sticky with evergreen gum, but triumphantly bearing several cone-laden branches. She still remembered the sweeping view from that treetop, the sense of breathtaking space beneath, stretching to the forested ridges and crags that rimmed her world.
Now, abruptly, Nolar was suspended far higher in the air than she had ever imagined in idle speculations of what a flying bird might see. She seemed to be hovering, bodiless, above a vast nocturnal panorama of mountains. Horribly, these mountains were not serenely still; they were moving. What should have been eminently solid, reliable earth was heaving, rolling, even rippling like the surface of a pot of thick, bubbling gruel. Oh, the poor animals, Nolar thought, then her self-awareness was crushed by a titanic thrust of outside will—a concerted, iron demand of concentrated Power reaching, probing down to the deep-buried bones of the mountains and stirring them, shaking them, pushing, pulling, tilting. The pressure seemed to build within Nolar's skull until she feared her head must burst. There was a crescendo of white-hot agony, during which she lost all sensation.
When Nolar slowly regained her awareness, she could still “see” the appalling turmoil being wreaked upon the mountains, compounded now by screaming winds, and torrential rain, and illuminated by eerie flares of lightning.
Gradually, amid the chaos, Nolar noticed disruptions, hesitations in the flow of Power, sudden brief pauses when the punishing pressure against the earth seemed to falter. The cataclysmic momentum, however, continued unabated, since all of the imbalances deliberately introduced by the Witches now had to work themselves out physically. The fabric of the hillsides buckled and slid. Immense avalanches were lubricated by the ice and water of unleashed glaciers, augmented by lakes and streams wrenched from their beds. Fires were kindled by lashing lightning, and as rapidly quenched by cascades of water and loose earth. Whole forests were being swept away as if they had never been. Nolar felt an inconsolable sense of loss as she knew she was witnessing the death of entire arrays of plants and animals—and people, should any be trapped in that unnatural cauldron of destruction.
Again, flickers of hesitancy stirred in her mind, followed by an incoherent pulse of sorrow, regret for all that was being sacrificed. Without warning, Nolar was transfixed by a pain of searing intensity. Something/someone was screaming her name against the cacophony of the storm.
“Nolar … Nolar! … NOLAR!”
Tormented, she cried out, “I am here! Here! Oh, stop, please, STOP!”
For a breath, there was a respite, then the imperative mental battering resumed. “Nolar … NOLAR … Lormt … LORMT! Quest … must go … Lormt … HEAR!”
Nolar's mind was reeling under the bombardment. Her own thoughts formed with painful slowness. Lorm t… the half-blind Witch. This … this Sending had to be coming from her. Immediately, as Nolar concentrated on her memories of the Witch, the ferocious pain ebbed from the mental contact, while the linkage seemed to strengthen. Emboldened, Nolar tried to respond, to reach back to the Witch, but her every effort was overridden, crushed by the sheer force of the Sending. Nolar helplessly endured the repetition of her name and the exhortations to go to Lormt until, to her numbed surprise, she realized that something was changing. The message was fading, growing less coherent, as if the mind projecting it was near exhaustion. The once clear pattern had degenerated
into a confusing jumble, but the sense of urgency and distress permeating it sharpened even as the strength behind the Sending drained away.
“Help me … sisters dying … blasted … too much Power. … NO! must not let go … pain … Es Castle. … Come, Nolar! … you must. … HURRY!” With that final mental shout, the contact snapped, leaving Nolar cowering on the ground.
Nolar lay still for several moments, her body trembling. Then she struggled to sit up, and rose shakily to her feet. The mountain air was no longer still; it smelled of impending rain, and gusted strongly from the south. Nolar's face felt chilled. When she brushed a hand against her cheek, her fingers came away wet with tears. She stumbled blindly down the slope, frantic to find the refuge of Ostbor's house. The formerly shuddering ground had subsided into a blessed solidity, but the wind and approaching thunder heralded the fringes of that mammoth storm battering the south. Cold—so cold. Would she ever feel warm again? Empty—so much gone—so many gone. Dazed, Nolar shook her head. She had shared the thoughts of another person—the half-blind Witch—leagues away, presumably in Es Castle itself.
Nolar gasped and fell when she abruptly collided with a rough wooden wall. Her house, at last—she groped her way inside, sobbing for breath, just as the storm broke. With shaking hands, Nolar seized a fire-hardened stick and prodded the fireplace coals to life. Hugging her shawl around her, she sank down on the hearthstones. She had to try to make sense of what she had just experienced. That she had seen and heard with her mind instead of with her own eyes and ears frightened Nolar almost beyond expression. She could no longer evade the awful question: could it be that after all these unknowing years, she actually possessed Witch talent? Nolar wanted desperately to deny it, to run away from it, but she knew she had to admit what had just happened. She had received a Witch Sending. From what Ostbor had told her, few common people had ever experienced a Sending, since Witches employed that use of the Power to communicate between themselves, or, if necessary, with those few others trained to receive their warnings or instructions. Nolar could not recall any references in the scrolls to an ordinary person like herself being granted visions of faraway events. And not only the disturbing visions and sounds of the cataclysm; Nolar had also shared some of the feelings evidently belonging to the half-blind Witch.