“Are you sure the Falconers use only real hawks?” he asked of the Captain.

“Those hawks are sacred to them.” Koris poked a finger into the mess Simon held, his face blank with amazement. “I do not think that this thing is any of their fashioning, for to them the birds are their power and they would not counterfeit that lest it either turn upon them or depart utterly.”

“Yet someone or something has tossed into the air of these mountains hawks which are made, not hatched,” Simon pointed out.

The witch leaned closer, reaching out a finger to touch as Koris had done. Then her eyes raised to Simon’s and there was a question in them, a shadow of concern.

“Outworld—” she spoke hardly above a whisper. “This is not bred of our magic, or of the magic of our time and space. Alien, Simon, alien…”

Briant interrupted her with a cry and pointing a finger. A second black and white shape was over their heads, swooping lower. Simon’s free hand went to the gun, but the boy reached down from his saddle to strike at Tregarth’s wrist and spoil his aim. “That is a real bird!”

Koris whistled and the hawk obeyed that summons in the clean strike of its breed, settling on a rock crown, the tip of the same pinnacle against which the counterfeit had dashed itself to wreckage.

“Koris of Estcarp,” the Captain spoke to it, “but let him who flies you come swiftly, winged brother, for there is ill here and perhaps worse to come!” He waved his hand and the falcon took once more to the air, to head straight for the peaks.

Simon put the other thing into one of his saddle bags. In the Eyrie he had been intrigued by the communication devices which the true falcons bore. A machine so delicate and so advanced in technical ability was out of place in the feudal fortress of its users. And what of the artificial lighting and heating systems of Estcarp, or the buildings of the Sulcarkeep, of that energy source Osberic had blown up to finish the port? Were all these vestiges of an earlier civilization which had vanished leaving only traces of its inventions behind? Or — were they grafts upon this world from some other source? Simon’s eyes may have been on the trail they rode but his wits were tumbling the problem elsewhere.

Koris had spoken of Volt’s non-human race preceding mankind here. Were these remnants of theirs? Or had the Falconers, the mariners of Sulcarkeep, learned what they wished, what served their purposes best from someone, or something else, perhaps overseas? He wanted a chance to examine the wreckage of the false hawk, to try and assess from it if he could the type of mind, or training, which could create such an object.