Free Lost Lands of Witch World by Andre Norton

pace. It was as if we rode through knee-deep, ever-shifting sand which sucked each hoof as it was placed, keeping us to a bare trot when every nerve demanded a full gallop. The clouds which had overshadowed the sunset thickened into a cover through which neither star nor moon shone.
    And now a weird embellishment was added to the landscape. I had once ridden along the Tor marsh and seen those eerie lights native to that forbidden country glow and dim over its mist-ridden surface. Now such wan gleams began to touch here and there about us—on the tip of a tree branch, the crown of a bush, along a vine wreathing a wall. The very alienness heightened the general apprehension which strove to overwhelm us.
    Our sense of anticipation grew moment by moment. And the Torgians reacted to it, snorting and rearing. I called to Kemoc:
    â€œIf we force them on now, they will panic!”
    I had been trying to hold them under mental control for the past half mile, but I could do it no longer. We dropped out of our saddles, and I stood between the two mounts, one hand on each strong neck, striving with all I possessed to keep them from bolting. Then Kemoc’s mind joined with mine, giving me added assistance, and the horses, still snorting, their eyes rolling, foam in sticky strings about their jaws, trembled but stood firm.
    While I was so concentrating upon that task I had not seen beyond, and now I was shocked by a sharp flash of fire across the sky. There was, in answer, an ominous grumbling unlike any natural thunder I had ever heard before. And it was not born in the sky above, but out of the ground under us, for that shuddered. The horses screamed, but they did not try to bolt. They crowded under my hold even as I clung to them, dimly feeling in that contact an anchor in a world gone mad.
    Those wan lights sprinkled here and there flamed higher, sent sharp points of pallid radiance skyward. Again the crack of lightning, a reply from the earth under us. A long moment of utter silence, then fury such as no man could imagine broke over and around us.
    The earth heaved in long rolls, as if under its once stable surface waves moved towards the southern highlands. Wind which had been missing all day burst into frantic life, whipping the candled trees and bushes, tearing the air from our nostrils. One could not fight this—one lost his very identity in such an alien storm. We could only endure and hope, very faintly hope, that we could outlast the raving elements of earth, fire, air, and then water. For there was rain—or could you truly name such stinging lashes of water rain?
    If the force of that storm drove us nearly witless, what must it have been like in those heights where it was brought to a climax? Mountains walked that night, lost themselves in vast waves of earth which ate away their sides, changed lowlands to highlands, and reversed the process by quake, slide, every violent action that could be evoked. The barrier formed by nature between Estcarp and Karsten, which we had kept fortified for years, was wrung, squeezed, wrought by a force which was initiated by human will, and once begun there was no altering of that destructive pattern.
    Mind to mind, hand to hand, Kemoc and I made one during that terror. Afterwards we could piece together but a little of the night. Truly it was the end of a world—hearing and sight were soon torn from us, touch only remained and we clung to that sense with a fierce intensity, lest, losing it, we might lose all else, including that which made us what we were.
    There was an end—though we had not dared to hope there could ever be. Dark as the matted clouds were over us, still there was light, gray as the tree candles, yet it was a light of the day rather than the weird glow of the storm. We still stood on the road, Kemoc and I and the horses, as if we had been frozen so amid the wild breakage of nature. The ground was solid under our feet, and a measureof sanity had