Icefalcons Quest Read online

  For Tir had begun to sob uncontrollably. "You're a pitiable thing." Casually, he released his grip and slapped him, in a single move. The slap was hard enough to stagger Tir. Hethya looked away.

  "Make your apology."

  "I'm sorry, Lord Bektis."

  I will kill him, thought the Icefalcon, very calmly, seeing the child's face and body, hearing the child's voice.

  He understood, and had agreed with, Ingold's decision to remain in Renweth Vale, relayed to him through the usual medium of an ice face and Cold Death.

  There was no way the old man could have over taken Vair's caravan in time to be of help. It was clear to them both that there was some threat to the Keep far beyond Vair's eleven hundred henchmen camped outside it, something that in all probability neither Wend nor Ilae would be capable of dealing with.

  But beneath his warrior's logic, the logic of the Real World, he wished he could at least have the knowledge and comfort that the mage was on the way to help where he could not.

  "The three springs are what you remember?"

  "Me lord," said Hethya, her Felwoods brogue breaking into Lord Vair's cold, focused scrutiny of Tir, "me mother was a witch of sorts. She could track the course of a stream underground, miles through the woods. Folk were all the time after her to do it for the farms. Could perhaps me Lord Bektis do the same beneath all this ice, and tell us if there are three springs down there?"

  Bektis grumbled and began to make passes with his hands above the ice. After a little time he reached into his muff and brought out the crystalline Device, which he affixed to his hand, pulling off his glove to do it and immediately surrounding himself with a heatspell that coalesced in curls of fog.

  The Icefalcon withdrew silently into the aquamarine chasms of ice, but followed the train as it veered eastward and dug a shelter within a hundred yards of it that night.

  The clouds returned with nightfall, segueing into a morning of strange fogs, but by midday there was no further need of Tir's navigation.

  Through the shadowy grayness and blowing ice the nameless mountain ridge pushed higher, a line of coaly rock like a cresting wave about to break, and at its base lay a great blister in the ice, a huge mound some five miles long, ancient ice, green and black at its heart and unchanging, the slow-moving floes all fractured and broken around its sides.

  "What is it?" Loses His Way squinted against the shadowless glare, for in the white world beneath the clouds one was not sure if what one saw was what one seemed to see.

  "At a guess," the Icefalcon murmured, "the ice is shaped by something that lies buried beneath."

  "Hethya?" Tir rolled over a little and propped up on one elbow in the wagon's dark. By her breathing Hethya didn't sleep, either, and he wondered if she had the same dreams that he did, about Ugal's head bobbing up over the side of the iron vat, blood-gorged purple flesh bulging out around the iron of the gag, ready to burst, eyes conscious wells of agony.

  No matter how close he held to her, no matter how many furs and blankets they piled on, he couldn't seem to stop shivering.

  Her voice was not the slightest bit sleepy, but muted, so the guard outside wouldn't hear. "What is it, me lamb?" Southland rum whiffed on her breath. It was often so now, at night.

  "Did your mama teach you about the machines? About how to work them?"

  He felt her breath still. Then she said, "Faith, lamb, me mother was a hedge-witch and a scholar, not one of the great old ones. I've said how it was, when as a little girl this voice would speak words in me head that only I could hear or understand. Oale Niu, now, the great d'ian sian, Ladymage and Queen ... Whyever would you think it was me mother?"

  But there was wariness in her voice.

  "Well, in the Keep we found these crystals," said Tir. "And Gil and Ingold"-he still couldn't speak Rudy's name-"they found a way to look into them with this black table, and they see a lot of things, things from the Times Before. That's how they learned to bring the potatoes back to life, the earth apples, so everyone could have enough to eat."

  His stomach clenched at the mention of eating. He didn't think he'd ever be able to eat again.

  "And if your mother was a witch and found some of these crystals, or some other things written about those old machines, I thought maybe she'd have taught you about them. Especially if there were machines like that hidden in Prandhays Keep."

  "Well, you're a sly one, and that's a fact," she murmured. "But I'm afraid you're out, me lamb, though it's true the ... the dethken iares"-she carefully mispronounced the words Oale Niu used for the chknai'es-"was at our Keep, or part of it was, anyway. Oale Niu, she showed me the way of it, long before Lord Vair turned up with the rest of it all in pieces and jumbled together with bits of other things."

  "Where did he get it?" He tried to sound casual and evidently succeeded.

  "He's not said-he's a close one, the evil old so-and-so, but me, I think despite what all the southrons say about their land being pure of wizardry from the days of dawn and all that other chat ... I think there was a Keep there in that city of theirs, that Khirsrit, once upon a time. And when he got driven out of the South by that poor girl he made his wife, bad cess to him, he took what he could."

  "And did he take over Prandhays Keep?"

  Hethya was silent for a time, running a lock of Tir's hair through her fingers. The iron winds had fallen, and noises could be heard around the camp, the squeak of the guards' boots in the snow, a man cursing one of the tethyn-the whole men, the real men, were always cursing the tethyn, usually for their stupidity. Hitting them, too, though Tir wanted to protest that it wasn't the tethyns' fault they were stupid. It was Vair's, for making them wrong.

  Still, there was a tension in the camp, a fear, screwing tighter and tighter. Yesterday a tethyn-one of the Hastroaals-had run amok, away from the lines, and had been killed by White Raider scouts not a hundred feet from the line of march; later a Ti Men and a Cia'ak had started attacking everyone in sight with their swords.

  They were possessed by demons, the men said. Though Vair said this was not so, he and Bektis had distributed the demon-scares that usually hung around the camp on poles and wagon-boxes among the men for the rest of the march.

  At least twenty hadn't given them back tonight, when they needed to make a Warding around the camp.

  Everybody was scared. And the great silent whaleback of the ice mountain, that giant green-black blister under its covering of snow that overshadowed the camp, made it worse.

  And if they knew what was under there, thought Tir despairingly, they'd be more scared than they were.

  He shut his eyes, trembling and suddenly sick at the thought, and Hethya, feeling him shiver, hugged him tight.

  "Well, and he did take over Prandhays," she said softly, and by her voice she was lost in a bitter dreaming of her own. "This past summer it was, in the days of the harvest, not that there was a great deal of that, and if me mother had lived I misdoubt it would have made a hair's difference. He's been gatherin' his southron troops and the local bandits together there ever since, him and that Delta Islands brute Gargonal, may the flesh rot from their stinking bones."

  The hate in her voice made him turn his head, though nothing of her could be seen in the blackness. Her hand felt like a piece of wood, closing on his shoulder.

  "Bastards, all of 'em, and Vair the biggest bastard of 'em. I don't know whether he came to Prandhays because he thought he could take it-Mother bein' dead and no wizard to go up against Bektis-or because he'd learned somehow there were bits and pieces of their foul machines left hid there, God knows by who, in the deep of time. But the first thing they did was go lookin' for 'em. And there's more such things, Bektis says, hid away in Dare's Keep, though he doesn't know where-leavin' aside the fact that anyone with a siege-engine or two could take Prandhays, and Dare's Keep, if Vair can take it, is near impregnable. If it hadn't been for me-for Oale Niu, that is-knowing the way of the weapons, I'd be there yet, bein' . . ."

  She checked
the angry spill of words, and her hand jerked a little, then patted his thin shoulder as if just remembering that he was there.

  "Bein' treated bad by every man of his pox-rotted regiment, one at a time or all together in a bunch, the pigs. Don't think hard on me, sweeting. You've got to do what you can."

  Tir nodded, remembering how he had kissed Vair's boots and told him he loved him before every man of the camp.

  "I know," he said. "But the wizards-the old wizards-didn't put fire-spells around the camp. They had these round gray rocks in iron holders that threw white light, and they called the-the thing that spits light, they called it chen yekas, not karnach like you do."

  "Ah," said Hethya softly. "And what did they call it, under the Ice, that we're seeking? What was their word for that?"

  Tir said gravely, mischievous for the first time in aching weeks, "Doesn't Oale Niu know that?"

  She tweaked his hair, hard, like an older sister, or his playmates who were dead. "Don't you be a clever boots with me, laddy-boy."

  Even the thought of it chilled the brief happiness he felt at teasing again, playing again, remembering what it used to be like to play. Quietly he said, "Tiyomis. That was their word for the Shadow that Waits at the End of Time."

  Bektis and Hethya set up the Dark Lightning on the western side of the ice hill and began to carve. The notch grew into a tunnel, steam rushing out in white torrents to innundate the surrounding world in fog, and the stupidest clones were sent to bail out the meltwater that collected as the tunnel grew deep. At the same time the wind eased and changed direction. The cinder-hued roof of cloud fractured. Lakes of green-stained pale sky shone through.

  "There will be a moon tonight," said the Icefalcon.

  He and his companions had dug a snow-cave in the sprawl of crevasse, ice wall, and dune that crazed the glaciers around three sides of the blister of ice. Scouting in the last of the evening light he'd found signs of the Earthsnake People among the ice and rocks of the rising mountain wall behind; this morning there had been more and, near them, later prints, prints he knew.

  The Talking Stars People. It was difficult to tell much in snowshoes, but he thought he recognized Blue Child's characteristically long stride. Those deeper prints of massive weight would surely be Red Fox, and always close at his side Stays Up All Night, who had been his strongest supporters against her.

  She would have sent Spider Music and Eyes In Her Pocket and some others after the horse herd, but most of the peoples of the Real World were wary about invaders in their territory, especially invaders whose intentions were not immediately apparent.

  It was more than a matter of many wagonloads of forged-steel southern weapons, though that was a consideration even above horses. They had suffered before, from the incursions of the mud-diggers of various sorts. They would not let themselves be surprised or outflanked again.

  From the top of the ice tower where they sat, the Icefalcon watched Nargois and Sergeant Red Boots set extra guards and confer worriedly with Vair. Bektis remained within the articulated spiral of the Dark Lightning's cage, like a hermit crab in some fantastic shell. From these, the Icefalcon turned his eyes to the sky, to the guards, to the flawed blue ice. The moon would be in its last quarter tonight, he recalled, but it should rise early and bright.

  "Will the weather hold clear tonight, o my sister?" She considered a moment, then nodded.

  "Vair will know that, too," remarked Loses His Way. He scraped a fingerful of sweetened bison fat from the heel of the rawhide bag and passed the bag along to the others. "He's expecting an attack, and I don't think he'll be disappointed."

  "Even so," said the Icefalcon. "They will all be on the watch for the Earthsnake People, or for Blue Child, whose coming, I think, will only help us. I think this may be our chance to get Tir out."

  Chapter 13

  Bodiless, the Icefalcon circled the camp.

  He found the Earthsnake People, bivouacked at the mountain's feet. The jagged terrain concealed their fires and the snow-caves where they awaited the night. The Dark Ones had taken their shaman seven years ago, as they had taken Walking Eyes of the Empty Lakes People, but his amulets were still strong. Bektis would have trouble putting spells of madness or terror on them.

  He saw the Talking Stars People moving in from the higher ground, one by one, Blue Child herself scouting the lead.

  Strange, thought the Icefalcon, to see her again, face-to-face. She did not seem aware of the shadow-walker keeping pace with her over the hard granular snow. She picked the way for her warriors masterfully, out of sight and out of the wind.

  Her face, like theirs, was greased thickly and wrapped to the eyes in a scarf of knitted mammoth wool stiff with the ice of her breath; all that he could see of her indeed were her eyes. Sky-blue, cold, and suspicious always, demanding of herself the perfection that the Icefalcon had always sought; they hadn't changed.

  She was a heavy-muscled woman and a tall one, acid scars of battle with the Dark Ones adding to the marks of the old burns. She would be difficult to defeat, thought the Icefalcon, when he issued his challenge-which she must accept if he backed it by the word of Loses His Way. He had been training hard, but she had been living hard, surviving in a world colder and crueler than the world of the Keep.

  Leading the people who should have been his to lead.

  "I think you don't want me to go because you want to keep me back," Dove in the Sun said to her-he could still hear the girl's voice and see the anger in those sapphire-bright eyes. "You think I'll be a warrior to match you. You're jealous of your standing."

  "I'm not jealous." Blue Child's harsh voice was calm. The Dove was the only person in the steadings she'd let talk back to her. "You're too young. You're not strong enough to survive a fight, or an injury. Not quick enough, and not hard enough."

  Her eyes had gone past the girl-pretty as a fox kit and as fierce, to the Icefalcon, her rival, watching from the corner by the sod-roofed longhouse of Noon's family, and she'd added, "And don't you let her talk you into taking her, either. She's not ready."

  But of course he had. The Dove could talk anyone into anything. Except Blue Child.

  Had it been because he loved her? Or because he was angry at Blue Child, who already clearly saw herself as Noon's heir? And for whose sake was the anger-the Dove's or his own?

  But in any case, he thought, moving off up the rime-ice on the dune, marveling still that in his shadowy state he left no tracks, it was not his doing that the Dove was killed. She had been speared, she had not the strength to keep her horse from panicking, and both had fallen. And that was all.

  But it was he who had had to tell Blue Child that her lover was dead.

  Demons floated, whispering, all around the camp.

  More of them, now, a dirty brown beating in the air. Sometimes only the glister of disembodied eyes, the dripping sheen of fangs. Mouths that tore at him, hissed-lights that jigged insanely over the snow.

  That sly fire peered from the eyes of at least eight of the clones in the camp. Two of them wore demon-scares. One, seeing the Icefalcon-or the demon within it seeing him-pointed straight at him and ran toward him, screaming and pointing and giggling.

  But two of the booted guards brought up their crossbows and shot the demon soldier, and the demon rolled forth from the man's mouth with the coughed blood of his collapsing lungs.

  It mauled and tore at the Icefalcon for a moment, but experience had shown him how to put aside at least some of the pain, how to shut his mind against it. The thing spat at him and reviled him in Noon's voice and went its way.

  The Icefalcon moved on, shaky with shock, with the fear and cold that were inescapable in the shadow state. The light was thinning away, fogs and steam drifting between the wagons from the ice mountain where the Dark Lightning still bored rendered all things strange and flat.

  When he passed the place where the clones' bodies were piled-more had died during the day, though they were only a few days old-he saw that the bodies,
stripped of their clothing, were piebald, skin like human skin in places, in others strangely textured, rough and granular, or covered with a fine fuzz of grayish wool.

  He found the wagon where Tir slept, set in the midst of the camp. There would be confusion when the Earthsnake People attacked later in the night. He ghosted from wagon to wagon, estimating distances, terrain, and what the lighting would be like in torch-flare and darkness.

  Judging where the Earthsnake People would make their attack and where the Talking Stars People would. Where he could make his entrance to the camp from the crevasses beyond-bundled in coats of bison and mammoth fur, one man looked much like another. Once back in his own body, the body that now slept in the ice-cave they'd dug last night, he'd be able to ...

  The hissing of the Dark Lightning ceased. Clones slopped, shivering, into the tunnel with leather buckets-a huge slab of clear ice marked the dumping area of the meltwater they carried out.

  Someone said, "Bring the boy."

  "And fetch me a tisane, for God's sake!" Bektis called from the metal cage of the Dark Lightning's cradle. He was heavily wrapped in his long coat, his head protected by a series of embroidered caps, scarves, and a hood.

  On the refugee train from Gae to Renweth after the city's destruction by the Dark Ones, Bektis' collection of warm garments and muffs had been a source of never-ending derision among the Guards. The Icefalcon wondered what these southern warriors had to say about him when Vair na-Chandros wasn't there to hear.

  More voices in the tunnel, and churning in the fog that filled it. Bektis had the air of a man at rest and would, the Icefalcon was certain, be occupied with his tisane for some time to come; he wasn't sure whether the dark flicker of the machine's beams would harm him, though it wasn't anything he cared to put to the test.

  He stepped into the tunnel's fog.

  The walls were slick ice, melted and frozen hard again, and blue as sapphire. The floor slanted downward, straight as if ruled, vanishing into dense fog and darkness.