Icefalcons Quest Read online

  "You understand the help I need from you? The greatness of the task I'm asking you to do?"

  "You know I'd follow you to the ends of time, my Lord..."

  "Good man. Good man..."

  Tir relieved himself away from the wagons-his bowels were liquid with disgust and fright-and then climbed back into his own wagon, snaking through the provisions to return to his nest of furs. His hands trembled so badly he could barely take off his mittens and coat, and he felt cold through to the marrow.

  The cold stayed with him, even under his blankets, growing deeper and deeper so that Tir wondered if he were dying. He tried to stay awake because he knew that when he went to sleep he'd remember fully, remember when he or that other boy had actually seen the whole thing, actually seen what happened in the iron vat (which was called a draik, he remembered, and wanted to scream at them, Stop telling me these things!).

  He woke up screaming, being shaken by a guard, an older man named Mongret, to whom he clung, sobbing, feeling as if his body would tear itself apart.

  "Is all right, Keshnithar," the man soothed him, calling him by the name some of the guards used when Vair wasn't there to hear: Keshnithar, Little King, though sometimes in good-natured jest they called him Drazha, Scarface. "Is all right. Oniox," he called out to another man who had come by, "get the lady, would you? Our boy's had a nightmare."

  The other guard glanced back at the black tent and grunted. "Small blame to him. The very air's evil tonight. She's over there."

  "Oh." There was silence, the men looking at each other through the thrown-back curtain at the back of the wagon. "Ah. Well." Mongret hugged Tir again, reassuring, but Tir knew that nobody was going to get Hethya.

  He wasn't even sure if he wanted to see her, for her clothing would smell of carrion and power and lightning, and he didn't know if he could stand that. "Is just dreams, Little King," he added, in broken Wathe. "You all right?"

  Tir sniffled, fighting hard not to seem a coward, and said, "I'll be all right," in the ha'al, which made both men smile.

  "That's my little soldier." The men liked him, though none of them would stand up to Vair for him. He didn't blame them for this. Neither commented on the fact that his hands weren't tied. "You want me stay a little, till you sleep?"

  Tir nodded. The man didn't speak the Wathe well enough to learn anything if he talked in his sleep. Mongret dried his tears with a rough, mittened hand, and Tir lay down, though he didn't sleep.

  There was an odd comfort in knowing that whichever of his ancestors it was who had, willing or unwilling, witnessed what he had witnessed-who had seen the skin peel back, the organs burst, the head swell and pop like an overripe grape-had been as sickened, as appalled, as terrified as he; had wished, like him, that he had never seen it. It was as awful for a grown man as it was for a little boy.

  It was almost daylight when Heytha returned to the wagon, took off her heavy outer garments, and curled up in her blankets. She smelled of the cheap southern rum from the keg in the back of the food wagon, which they sometimes distributed when the nights were very cold.

  Tir listened to her breathing. He didn't think she slept. Later on in the morning, when they were breaking camp, Tir saw that the camp was crowded with tethyn, over a hundred of them, and all with those strangely patched-looking skins, all with the same few faces: Tuuves, Hastroaal, Ti Men... Their eyes were blank, not like the eyes of the Akulae or of the tethyn who'd formed the train from Bison Knoll.

  Those had been slow and stupid but human. Though some of these could speak, others only grunted or made soft noises in their throats. When Tir encountered Ugal, wearing makeshift clothing and rawhide wrapped around his feet instead of boots, he had to run away behind one of the wagons and vomit.

  He was still kneeling there, soaked with sweat and shaking, when Hethya found him and told him that she had to take him to Vair. It was time the train moved on, out onto the ice itself.

  Chapter 12

  With dawn they brought the Dark Lightning up to the ice face and began to carve.

  "Behold their road." The Icefalcon wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. He had already seen how clouds hung over the ice cap, columns of gray and black and dazzling white where the sun struck them. Up on the ice it would be world-winter indeed.

  "It is bad hunting." Loses His Way passed him one of the doublesewn coats of bison-hide and a short-handled war ax. "Never have I seen so bad a hunt. See how the lady holds close to the boy? She fears for him." From a distance he'd become very taken with Hethya.

  "She fears for herself. He is in her charge."

  Loses His Way shook his head, and for a time they watched Hethya and Bektis, together at the controls of the Dark Lightning. The unholy colorless glim in the air wickered forth, played across the pearl face of the Ice. The notch at its edge deepened, steam gushing to join the cloud cover, and milky water flowed in a sputtering, steaming stream.

  "She is wise," he said approvingly, watching her issue instructions to Bektis, who turned the Dark Lightning in its geared cradle, the apparatus moving like a hunting cat seeking prey. They had been busy in the night, for, around them, many new clones affixed leather boots to the feet of the mules and dragged the sledges up the rocks.

  Vair in his quilted garments of white fur and silk spoke to Hethya, and she returned some haughty reply. "She knows not to show her fear. Does your man in the ice pool know aught of this Dark Lightning, little shaman?"

  A few minutes previously Cold Death had blown on and rubbed one of the hard-frozen puddles near their camp, scratching the surface with a pebble and speaking Ingold's name. The Icefalcon had been aware of the sweet high bird chitter of her voice all during the bringing up of the Dark Lightning, as she narrated what she saw to the Archmage of the Wizards of the West.

  He saw the old man in his mind, shaggy and scrubby and filthy as Ingold generally was after his journeyings, tucked like an apologetic old dog into some cranny of the rocks close enough to the besiegers to go and help himself to supper at their campfires. If he knew Ingold, the old man was doing it, too, on a nightly basis. The thought brought a pang of envy. The Icefalcon was heartily weary of pemmican.

  "Ingold says he has never heard of such a matter." She came to the two men to watch, gloved hands shoved in her pockets like an impish girl. "But he did not seem surprised that the magic of the Ancestors of wizards could be turned to such a use."

  "Did he say what he thought," inquired the Icefalcon, "of this woman who claims to be possessed by the Ancestors of wizards? Whether what she says is possible?"

  "All things are possible," replied Cold Death cheerfully. "From the remaking of the world to the rescue of this child. Come. If we're to be on the Ice before them, it is well that we start to climb now. We have no Dark Lightning, no magic from the Ancestors of wizards, to help us."

  The horses Cold Death turned loose to forage to the south, laying a Word on them to return at her summoning.

  Vair appointed ten men, none of them clones, and these took what remained of his horse herd and drove them away south. "A present for Blue Child," said Cold Death, and grinned. "How kind!"

  But not the act, thought the Icefalcon, watching the beasts grow smaller in the desolate valley's distance, of a man who had any intention of returning along the road he had come.

  Curious.

  The wall of ice that rose beyond Daylily Hill was broken into a succession of chimneys, towers, crevasses and blocks, mushrooms and cauliflowers of ice and fanged overhangs that forbade ascent.

  Snow shoes weren't the only things the Icefalcon and his companions had worked on in the starlit dark and reflected ember glow. The thinner garments they'd taken from the cache, the empty food bags, and anything they could not use they had sliced up, weaving ropes of the rawhide strips.

  Still it was a difficult ascent. The Icefalcon led, hacking his way with an ax and cutting steps for the others, looping the rope that Loses His Way could follow. The food, and the rough sled they had m
ade to drag it, they raised after them in slings, and last of all Yellow-Eyed Dog, puzzled but content to follow Loses His Way.

  The world at the top was alien beyond belief, long snowfields alternating with broken hogbacks and chopped zones of ice hills, rough seracs and towers all colorless, cold, and dead in the clouded light.

  Iron-hued rock ridges carved the distant horizons-the Icefalcon recognized with shock the crests of the Little Snowy Mountains-and dunes of snow rose to the west, hiding the notch carved by the Dark Lightning. Above those dunes, however, billowed columns of steam, marble-white in the grizzle of the sky.

  "They'll know they're being followed, do they but look over the crest of those dunes." The Icefalcon contemplated the windblown powder snow, the mush of tracks they had left, and Yellow-Eyed Dog bounding idiotically about snapping at flying flakes.

  The cold tore at his face despite the thick coating of bison fat and seemed to eat through his gloves. His breath froze hard in his beard, and the air burned not only his lungs but his eyes and his teeth.

  "They know it already." Cold Death shrugged. "What are three more barbarian scouts and a dog? Nothing in our tracks says, Here is a man who has trailed you from Renweth Keep. At least not in a tongue they can read."

  The Icefalcon wasn't happy about it-it offended his sense of fitness to leave so much as a mark on the snow-but he knew she was right.

  Still, he chose the hardest snowpack and black ice to traverse once they got their snowshoes on and led the way up the wind-carved slopes, single file to obscure their numbers, to a vantage point where they could observe the wagons' ascent.

  Fog drowned the space beyond, the ice cut nearly hidden as the columns of steam spread and dispersed. In the dead light it was difficult to judge distances, and the murk made it worse; the sound of water trickling down the artificial couloir came dimly to them, with the sound of axes cutting steps in the snow and voices calling orders. A mule brayed, protesting to the Ancestors of animals at the task it was required to perform.

  "Cruel hunting, o my sister," the Icefalcon murmured. "And to what end I do not know. We will now need your wisdom indeed."

  They moved thereafter through a world of ice and fog, like wolves pursuing reindeer across the heart of winter. Sometimes they could approach the caravan no closer than several miles, laboring through rough ice and the broken wildernesses.

  At other times, when snow whirled down or white fog reduced everything to the ghostly stillness of the gray territory that lies between death and life, they drew nearer, concealed by Cold Death's spells.

  By night they dug snow-caves in the sides of the long glacial ridges, and sometimes the Icefalcon would hack his way up a serac or block or ice tower, and sit for as long as he could endure the cold, watching the lights of the distant camp.

  These were the lands that had been the Night River Country. He knew it, sighting on the familiar peaks in the distance: the Yellow Ancestor, the Peak of Demons, the Peak of Snows, in exactly the distance and relationships he had known, it seemed, since before he knew his name.

  More than anything that knowledge, that awareness, lodged in the Icefalcon's heart, a buried unacknowledged hurt, like an arrowhead embedded in his flesh; that under the ice, under his feet, lay the world of his childhood summers, the aspens and the meadows and the place called Pretty Water Creek.

  The ice had eaten it. Time had eaten it. Even when, in eons of time, the ice disgorged it again, it would not be as it had been, but would be scoured and pressed and twisted out of recognition.

  He would be gone, too, of course. But those meadows now existed only in his mind, as the faces of the Ancestors of wizards existed only in the gray crystals Gil read in the Keep.

  This was not something of which he could speak to Loses His Way or to his sister; maybe not to anyone. Never in his life had he wept for anyone, for to weep was to be weak, and to mourn loss was to give power away to that which was lost, and to Time. But his heart wept for the Night River Country, the home of his childhood that was gone.

  In this bitter world, demons glided across the snow. By day they sometimes had the appearance of whirlwinds, and, in the short terrible nights, of flickering lights far off over the Ice. Their voices whined and sang even when the wind was still.

  Toward evening of the second day on the Ice one of the clones broke from his place in the line of march and stumbled, slipping and shrieking and brandishing his sword, toward the place where the Icefalcon and his companions struggled along on the other side of a flow-ridge.

  The man came smashing through the thin crest of the ridge almost on top of the Icefalcon. The Icefalcon had his sword in his hand already and aimed for his neck, but the man ducked at the last moment and the blade caught him on the collarbone. The clone turned and lunged at him again, sword drawn, grinning like a dog, and as the Icefalcon stabbed him through the chest he realized that the man was possessed of a demon.

  The demon came out of the man's mouth like a glowing mist that thrashed and clawed at the Icefalcon's eyes and face for a moment and then was gone. The body of the dead clone lay in the snow at his feet.

  Shouting on the other side of the snow ridge. The Icefalcon, Cold Death, and Loses His Way fled, sliding and slithering down the ridge, with Yellow-Eyed Dog bounding happily behind.

  Later, after the sergeant in the red boot-laces had looked at the dead man, cursed about barbarians, stripped off all the clothing and weapons and gone away again, they returned to look at the body.

  "He makes his warriors out of air." Cold Death knelt to touch the hairless face, already rimed with frost. "Or wood and dirt and dead flesh, as the case may be. But he can't make a man's soul. It was only a matter of time before the demons found a way into the living flesh."

  "Will they seek us out again?" Loses His Way fumbled at his heavy furs, as if to touch the amulet he wore against his skin beneath. "I have an amulet made for me by Walking Eyes."

  "Amulets work against demons because the demons are spirit only," said Cold Death, standing up again and grabbing Yellow-Eyed Dog by the ruff to pull him away from the corpse. "The flesh of these things may protect the demons from the amulets' power..."

  "With Walking Eyes' amulets," the Icefalcon added unkindly, "it wouldn't take much."

  There was an outcry from farther off, and the clashing of swords. The three warriors scrambled up the trampled flow-ridge to see what the problem was. Two other clones had attacked their fellows, cutting madly all about them with swords and daggers, the blood like scattered poppies, garish on the snow. Even at the distance of half a mile the Icefalcon could hear them laughing crazily as they were dragged down and killed.

  "They eat fear," said Cold Death softly. "Live on it, as butterflies drink perfumes."

  Vair stood over the fallen bodies of the two clone lunatics. There was no need to see his face. His whole body was a threat, a quest for someone to savage. Bektis, beside him, explained at great and mellifluous length why none of this was his fault.

  In time Vair turned aside, but it was clear from the way he moved that he was not a happy man.

  Later in that same day they reached the far edge of the snowfield. The ice buckled and faulted in a maze of towers and crevasses, huge wind-carved ridges interlaced like the fingers of a hand.

  This formation narrowed toward the north, and the Icefalcon guessed it was in fact a continuation of the valley he had known as the Place of the Bent-Horned Musk Ox, which even in his day had been walled by hanging glaciers.

  The caravan stopped, and Tir and Hethya were summoned. The Icefalcon was able to work his way to within a hundred feet of them. Tir was saying, "There was a creek that came out of the hills here. A canyon went back into the ridges, that way."

  He gestured with one mitted hand. The day had cleared with the advance of evening, and the mountains to the north were clearly visible; about a day east lay a line of broken-toothed black rocks thrusting through the gashed jumble of ice.

  Everything flashed in the
high pearly light, the snow like cloud and the Ice a thousand shades of blue and green where the wind scoured it, the mules panting under their fur robes, frost forming on their muzzles as it formed on the beards of the true men, the bare flesh of the faces of the clones.

  In the wan strange light Tir's face looked like a little skull amid the gray fur of his hood, nothing left of it but the great blue eyes and the unhealed tracks of cuts. Are they trying to starve the boy to death? The wounds had the look of malnutrition to them, and his face was bruised in a way the Icefalcon did not like.

  "Certainly the lie of the ice seems to indicate that the land beneath rises in that direction." Bektis stroked his snowy beard. "But whether we are in fact at the place where we must bend our course eastward to meet the valley of which the child speaks..."

  Tir took a deep breath; it seemed to the Icefalcon that he was trembling. He closed his eyes.

  "There was ... there were three creeks that came together," he said slowly. "Right here. There was a waterfall, and a pool. We saw a wolf drinking there one night. Daddy-Father-We turned there. The road turned there. We made for that notch in the ridge." He pointed. "We journeyed through the night, and I remember the sound of the water running beside the road."

  "And if you traveled in darkness," retorted Bektis spitefully, "where were the Dark Ones? They should have been thick about your train as wasps around honey."

  "I don't know!" Tir almost screamed the words. "I don't know! I just say what I remember, and that's what I remember!"

  "Don't speak disrespectfully to Lord Bektis." Vair caught the boy under the chin. "He doesn't like it. I don't like it, either, to hear a child of your years lash out like a savage. And stop crying."