Lost Lands of Witch World Read online

  Lost Lands

  of

  Witch World

  TOR BOOKS BY ANDRE NORTON

  The Crystal Gryphon

  Dare to Go A-Hunting

  Flight in Yiktor

  Forerunner

  Forerunner: The Second Venture

  Here Abide Monsters

  Moon Called

  Moon Mirror

  The Prince Commands

  Ralestone Luck

  Stand and Deliver

  Wheel of Stars

  Wizards’ Worlds

  Wraiths of Time

  Grandmasters’ Choice (Editor)

  The Jekyll Legacy (with Robert Bloch)

  Gryphon’s Eyrie (with A. C. Crispin)

  Songsmith (with A. C. Crispin)

  Caroline (with Enid Cushing)

  Firehand (with P. M. Griffin)

  Redline the Stars (with P. M. Griffin)

  Sneeze on Sunday (with Grace Allen Hogarth)

  House of Shadows (with Phyllis Miller)

  Empire of the Eagle (with Susan Shwartz)

  Imperial Lady (with Susan Shwartz)

  CAROLUS REX (with Rosemary Edghill)

  The Shadow of Albion

  Leopard in Exile

  BEAST MASTER (with Lyn McConchie)

  Beast Master’s Ark

  Beast Master’s Circus

  THE GATES TO WITCH WORLD (omnibus)

  Including:

  Witch World

  Web of the Witch World

  Year of the Unicorn

  LOST LANDS OF WITCH WORLD (omnibus)

  Including:

  Three Against the Witch World

  Warlock of the Witch World

  Sorceress of the Witch World

  THE WITCH WORLD (Editor)

  Four from the Witch World

  Tales from the Witch World 1

  Tales from the Witch World 2

  Tales from the Witch World 3

  WITCH WORLD: THE TURNING

  I Storms of Victory (with P. M. Griffin)

  II Flight of Vengeance (with P. M. Griffin & Mary Schaub)

  III On Wings of Magic (with Patricia Mathews & Sasha

  Miller)

  MAGIC IN ITHKAR (Editor, with Robert Adams)

  Magic in Ithkar 1

  Magic in Ithkar 2

  Magic in Ithkar 3

  Magic in Ithkar 4

  THE SOLAR QUEEN

  (with Sherwood Smith)

  Derelict for Trade

  A Mind for Trade

  THE TIME TRADERS

  (with Sherwood Smith)

  Echoes in Time

  Atlantis Endgame

  THE OAK, YEW, ASH, AND ROWAN CYCLE

  (with Sasha Miller)

  To the King a Daughter

  Knight or Knave

  A Crown Disowned

  THE HALFBLOOD CHRONICLES

  (with Mercedes Lackey)

  The Elvenbane

  Elvenblood

  Elvenborn

  Lost

  Lands of

  Witch World

  Comprising

  Three Against the Witch World,

  Warlock of the Witch World,

  and Sorceress of the Witch World

  ANDRE NORTON

  With an Introduction by Mercedes Lackey

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  LOST LANDS OF WITCH WORLD

  Omnibus copyright © 2004 by Andre Norton

  Introduction copyright © 2004 by Mercedes Lackey

  Three Against the Witch World, copyright © 1965 by Andre Norton

  Warlock of the Witch World, copyright © 1967 by Andre Norton

  Sorceress of the Witch World, copyright © 1968 by Andre Norton

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Edited by James Frenkel

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Norton, Andre.

  Lost lands of Witch World / Andre Norton.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  Contents: Three against the Witch World—Warlock of the Witch World—Sorceress of the Witch World.

  ISBN 0-765-30052-4 (acid-free paper)

  EAN 978-0765-30052-2

  1. Witch World (Imaginary place)—Fiction. 2. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3527.O625A6 2004

  813’.52—dc22

  2003071153

  First Edition: June 2004

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Introduction by Mercedes Lackey

  Three Against the Witch World

  Warlock of the Witch World

  Sorceress of the Witch World

  Introduction

  Andre Norton’s Witch World:

  An Appreciation

  Once upon a time, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the only category in the “imaginative fiction” genre was science fiction. Never mind that there was a rich heritage of fantasy fiction ranging from the Middle Ages onward; in the bookstores (and for book buyers) it was all lumped under the heading of Science Fiction. And, to tell the truth, the pickings available to those who appreciated fantasy were pretty slender. There were Robert E Howard’s Conan stories and the many imitators of those stories, of course, if you wanted Iron-Thewed Manly Fiction. There were reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his ilk from the days of the pulps. But for those whose tastes ran to something more concerned with magic and wonder, well, there wasn’t a lot in the paperback section. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy had just become available, both in the pirated Ace edition (heavily edited) and the Ballantine version (which had Tolkien’s blessing). There was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which had finally gone into paperback because of Lerner and Lowe’s musical, Camelot, which was based upon it. But there was precious little else for someone stuck in small-town America or the endless tract houses of suburbia, as I was.

  For readers in the big cities, things were not nearly so bleak. If you had access to a really good big-city or university library, you might be able to find C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia in the children’s section, as well as the works of George MacDonald, or at least The Princess and the Goblin. You might even be able to find the great Edwardian and Victorian fantasists, such as Lord Dunsany. If you were a science fiction cognoscente, you might have in your magazine collection C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories, and in fact the magazines Amazing, Astounding, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction occasionally printed a fantasy tale.

  But for the most part, for those of us whose reading consisted of what we could find at the corner drugstore, with rare forays into a “real” bookstore, anything that might be described as fantasy was generally science fiction in a different costume. Magic was almost always psychic powers with other names. Occasionally you could find a gothic romance with magical trappings—in fact, the late Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife was marketed that way. Such a rare find was treasured indeed and required a lot of digging.

  Then came the year 1963, and a slim little book from Ace called Witch World by Andre Norton, and everything changed. Perhaps not so strangely, the fact that a change was in the air was hardly obvious, not even to those who saw the book. It’s difficult to see chang
e when you are on top of it—often it is only apparent in retrospect.

  Science fiction fans had known all about Andre Norton for some time; her novels Daybreak 2250 A.D., The Last Planet, and especially Beast Master were staples in any collection. She had been writing and publishing books since 1935, although she didn’t start to become a big name in science fiction until the early 1950s; she had a solid reputation for producing consistently great stories and a long, long list of books in her backlist (some forty-five books in all by 1963).

  In fact, C. J. Cherryh later said of her, “I’ve seen a complete collection of Andre Norton’s books and it haunts me to this day, sort of like the sight of an unscalable Everest.”

  Miss Norton was prolific, and she was good—and by 1963 most people knew, thanks to a little Author’s Note in the front of the books, that the masculine “Andre” was the nom de plume of the very feminine lady born Alice Mary Norton (who is, by the way, no relation to the lady of the same name who published the Borrowers books for children). When Andre first presented her books to publishers, she was advised that “science fiction is a boy’s genre” and that “boys won’t read books written by women,” hence the name change, which she made legal in 1934. Well, boys did read her books, and girls, and people who were decidedly older than “boys” and “girls.” She wrote in several genres—western, juvenile historical, and even gothics—but the genres that she loved most, and did the majority of her work in, were science fiction and fantasy.

  At any rate, Andre had a respected name in science fiction, and was popular enough that her titles made it to corner drugstore racks everywhere. I already was an avid devourer of her work, as Beast Master was the second science fiction book I ever read (I believe I was about eleven at the time), and it led to my combing the shelves of the Science Fiction section of my local library for her works. She was among the few—such as Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and H. G. Wells—whose works were popular enough that libraries purchased them in special hardbound editions. How could I not enjoy her work? Here were incredible, wild, exotic worlds where being different was special. Heady stuff for a bookish kid who was very definitely “different.”

  That was where I first encountered Beast Master, in fact, and if all you know about that story is the regrettable and eminently forgettable movies and television series, then believe me, you don’t have any idea of what wonderful books it, and its sequel, Lord of Thunder, are. To begin with, these are real science fiction masterpieces with never a fur loincloth in sight. They feature Native Americans (not vanilla Caucasians) as the heroes, something that was totally unheard of at the time, and Andre Norton carefully researched the Navaho culture to bring her high-tech, psionic warrior, Hosteen Storm, to life. His Beast Team, genetically engineered before there was a term for such things, is composed of meerkats (not ferrets), a cougar, and the creature that truly enthralled me, an African Black Eagle (not a Redtailed Hawk, nor a Harris Hawk, nor any other bird of prey, short of an owl, that the cheapskate movie producers had on hand). Go read the books; you will soon understand why Andre insisted that her name be removed from the movie, and why she regards the sale of those rights as the worst mistake she ever made.

  But I digress. Needless to say, Andre Norton was very familiar to me, and I soon went through every Norton book in the library. Then I canvassed the drugstore, then made twice-yearly forays to Chicago and the only “real” bookstore I knew of, Krochs. Finally, in desperation, I began mail ordering volumes from the backs of existing books. This might seem irredeemably quaint in these days of amazon.com and Web sites, but in those days people generally didn’t mail order anything, unless it was in a catalog from a major department store like Sears, Montgomery Ward, or the like. I would save money from my allowance (fifty cents a week), put together four or five dollars, and, with grave trepidation, put it in an envelope to Ace Books. Six or eight weeks later, a brown-paper-wrapped package would arrive, holding treasure. I still have my original forty-cents copy of Witch World, purchased at Krochs. On the list of books in the back, I put tick marks for the books I didn’t have yet and wrote little numbers beside them for the ones I wanted first. My book also had an Antioch Bookplate in medieval illumination style with my name on it in the front.

  I bought a lot of those books—always trying, being as frugal as possible, to get the books at thirty cents each before the price went up to thirty-five or forty. After all, my fifty-cents-per-week allowance had to stretch as far as I could make it go—not only to buy science fiction books but Christmas and birthday presents, records (classical and folk), and after Beatlemania hit me in late 1964, fan magazines and still more records.

  At any rate, here was Witch World, in my hot little thirteen-year-old hands. Let me quote the blurb on the back:

  BY THE AUTHOR OF DAYBREAK 2250 A.D. For the myriads of Andre Norton readers, those who know Norton’s books to be the tops in science-adventure, WITCH WORLD will prove to be a special treat. It’s an all-original novel about a weird, adventure-filled planet where certain of the laws of nature operate differently—in fact, certain types of “magic” apparently work. Into this far-out space world, an Earthman is sent to test his skill against this new type of science. Witch World is high adventure in super-science, witchcraft, and fantasy-romance that will remind you of the best of such varied writers as Burroughs, Tolkien, and Brackett—and yet remains ANDRE NORTON in top form!

  Now, by now you should have noticed that the word fantasy appears only once in that blurb, and that, if you were not already aware of the fact that it really was a fantasy, you could be forgiven for assuming this was another of Andre’s space-faring tales. The fact is, it was marketed as science fiction; even the cover (by the great Jack Gaughan) would make you think that was what it was—the art prominently featured a man wearing a helmet that appeared to be a cross between the head of a hawk and the head of a toucan. He was carrying what looked, for all intents and purposes, to be a classic ray gun. True, the three men behind him had swords, spears, and shields, but they were in the background. The ray gun was in the foreground. From the perspective of 2003, I still wonder about this decision, which persisted into the late 1960s. What was so difficult about the word fantasy? Why did the publishers shy away from using it? Were they afraid that it would somehow be dismissed as another Conan clone?

  But from the moment you read the first page, you knew you had something different.

  The hero was a shadowy man with a shadowy past, Simon Tregarth, on the run in some unspecified, modern city, being hunted down by a hit man named “Sammy” (never seen), sent by one “Hanson” (also never seen), for some unspecified, but clearly terrible, affront. Whoever he was, Simon Tregarth was clearly dangerous, clearly competent, and his services (also unspecified but darkly hinted at) came at a high price, for he had something like twenty thousand 1963 dollars in his pocket (that would be enough to buy a new car, a house, a vacation home, a boat, and still have half left over). In short, it started rather like a James Bond novel. And within a few pages, you also knew that Simon Tregarth, though he trafficked with bad men and considered the money he made to be dirty, was, at heart, a man of honor. He had been tricked into the position he was in, his fall from grace engineered by the unscrupulous, and he continued because he had no other choice.

  But he is intercepted over his (presumably last) dinner by a mysterious gentleman, Dr. Jorge Petronius, a man who has a reputation for making hunted people vanish. Simon is very well aware of this reputation, so he listens as Petronius tells him a strange story of menhirs, ancient magic, and the Siege Perilous, which he claims can open to a man the world he has been unconsciously searching for all his life. He styles himself the Guardian of the Siege Perilous—the latest of many. He offers Tregarth the use of the Siege Perilous. Being desperate, Tregarth takes his offer and the seat upon the Siege—and at dawn, a new world opens to him.

  And that is where the book takes an abrupt departure from everything that Andre Norton
had written before this.

  Oh, there were some superficial trappings of science fiction—the “dart guns” used by Estcarp and other nations of the world, and some few similar bits and bobs. The ultimate enemy in the book does turn out to be the Kolder, a nasty set of aliens, who have wrenched open a way to their world with the goal of conquering the one that harbors Estcarp. And certainly Simon Tregarth himself speculates that some of the “magic” might be psychic in nature, because the Witches of Estcarp do use telepathy and some other powers that might be called “psionic.”

  But there is magic, real magic in play here, for not only is it magic that opens the gate to another world, but within nine pages after their meeting, the hunted Witch that Simon rescues from men and hounds calls up a lightning storm that kills every one of her hunters. She does this using nothing more than a drop of her blood and a mysterious cloudy gemstone she wears around her neck.

  By this time readers had figured out that this was nothing like science fiction. What was more, they liked it.

  I certainly did; here, in a pure adventure story, was not only fantasy, but something new to me, at least—not a hero, but a fantasy heroine. The unnamed Witch that Simon encounters within moments of his entry into Witch World is a woman in command of herself, competent to a fault, and possessed of her own sort of power that does not depend on swords or guns. And Estcarp, unlike the iron-fisted kingdoms of the Conan stories, was a matriarchy. Women had power here and were perfectly capable of ruling their kingdom without benefit of a king. Forget Conan; he’d find himself out-maneuvered in five minutes by the Witches of Estcarp, shown the door, and left standing outside, scratching his head and wondering what had happened. Our first look at the Witches of Estcarp is sympathetic, although the Witches have scant use for one of their sex who shares her gift and power and gives it up to live a life with a mere man.

  It got better. A quarter into the book we encounter Loyse of Verlaine, the feisty young heiress to the wealthy wrecker-duchy, who is about to be bound in ax-marriage to the ruler of Kars. She appears to be a classic Gothic heroine; slight, pale, unpretty, unregarded, the pawn of her stepfather’s plans. She is even presented in the classic Gothic setting—the storm-wracked castle tower overlooking a cliff and an angry sea.