Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  When they had arrived in the train of Ingold the Wizard on the morning following the final destruction of Gae, the Icefalcon had guessed immediately that Gil-Shalos, who now sat beside him in the loose black clothing of the Guards, would survive. He had seen the warrior in her eyes.

  Rudy he had not been so sure of. Even after the young man had found in himself the powers of the Wise Ones-powers that evidently did not exist or were not accessible to humans in his own world-the Icefalcon would not have bet the runt of a pot dog's litter on Rudy's survival.

  He might do so today, he thought, but not much more. For all that Rudy had been through, under Ingold's tutelage and on his own, like many civilized people he lacked the cutting blade of hardness in his soul.

  "I've never heard of anything of the kind," he said. "Neither has Ingold, as far as I know. At least he's never mentioned it to me."

  He shook his long dark hair from his eyes, an unprepossessing figure in his laborer's clothes and his vest of brightly painted bison-hide. "When we're done here, I'll contact him and ask."

  "It is a most inopportune moment," put in the elderly Lord Ankres dryly, "for Lord Ingold to have absented himself from the Keep." Gil-Shalos stiffened at this slight to the mage who was her lover, her life, and the father of her young son, but as a member of the Guards it was not her place to speak out of turn to one of the Keep Lords. Rudy answered, however.

  "When you come to think of it, my Lord, there never is an opportune moment for Ingold to go scavenging. I mean, hell, nothing ever happens in the winter because the bandits and the White Raiders are as locked down by the weather as we are, but then Ingold can't get out, either. The only times he can get to the ruins of the cities is in summer. Are you saying you'd rather he didn't find stuff like sulfur and vitriol to kill the slunch in the fields? Or books?"

  "He could leave the books for another time," responded the stout Lord Sketh. "There are things we need more."

  "Like a new brain for you, meathead?" muttered Gil under her breath.

  "Be that as it may," Minalde intervened, with her usual artlessly exact timing, "the fact is that Lord Ingold is at Gae just now and can be contacted easily by any of the mages here. Wend? Ilae? Have either of you heard tell of such a thing, that one of the wizards of the Trnes Before should possess the mind and soul of someone in our times?"

  Both the dark-eyed little ex-priest and the slim young woman shook their heads. Their ignorance was scarcely a surprise, as neither had received formal training in wizardry. The Dark Ones had been hideously efficient in wiping out the schools in the City of Wizards and everyone else with obvious ability in the art.

  "Well, I've never heard of such, either," said Hethya. "And believe me, your Ladyship, I've looked."

  "It is a rare-a very rare-phenomenon." Uncle Linok spoke for the first time, from the corner by the hearth. He adjusted the shawls and blankets wrapped about him, wool and fur and the combed and spun underwool of the mammoth, yak, rhinoceros, and uintatheria that the Keep's hunters trapped and speared in the winter when the great lumbering animals migrated from the North.

  "But it is by no means unheard of. As a collector and collator of old manuscripts myself, I've found mention of it only once, in the Yellow Book of Harilomne."

  "Harilomne?" Brother Wend straightened up, dark eyes growing wide. "Harilomne the Heretic? He was a mage of great power, who sought out and studied all records of the arts of the Times Before, in the days of Otoras Blackcheeks, my Lady," he explained, turning to Minalde. "It was said he knew more about those lost arts than any man living, though no one knows how he found it out. No one has ever found his library..."

  "And just as well," said the Bishop Maia. "Just because a thing was wrought by the mages of those times does not mean that it was wholesome, or worthy of being found. The Times Before were years of great evil as well as great knowledge. Some of the knowledge Harilomne uncovered was used to great ill, as anyone will tell you, my Lady."

  "But three of his books were supposed to be at Gae," put in Rudy. "That's what that merchant guy last month told Ingold. That he'd seen them in the cellar of a wrecked villa there. That's why Ingold took off the way he did."

  "And well he should," said Linok. "All knowledge, all magic, is precious in these times." He made a gesture, then, of stroking his ragged beard, and something in his movement-the way his hand came up, wrist leading like an actor's-snagged at the Icefalcon's mind. An impression, gone immediately, that he knew this man. Had seen him somewhere before.

  But the round face, the wide-set eyes, and the snub nose were not familiar. Someone who looked like him? A kinsman?

  But he knew as soon as he phrased the question that it wasn't that. Linok went on, "The single reference in the Yellow Book speaks of a girl in the reign of Amir the Lesser who was 'possessed of a spirit of her ancestors,' who apparently spoke languages unknown to any in the world. She could identify and explain an 'apparatus' said to have stood in the vaults beneath the Cathedral of Prandhays since the founding of the city. What this apparatus was the book did not say, and the apparatus itself is now long gone, but it was said that the thing produced a great light, and while the light shone none could enter or leave the Cathedral, nor certain areas of its grounds."

  "A force field?" Rudy looked across at Gil-the word he used was unfamiliar, in the tongue of their own world that neither spoke much anymore. "I'll be buggered. You ever hear Ingold mention that?"

  She shook her head.

  "And was it an apparatus," asked Minalde, folding small slim hands in her embroidered lap, "that you came to the Vale of Renweth to seek, Hethya?"

  The woman hesitated for a long time, her eyes seeking Linok's. The old man nodded.

  "I think we can trust these good people, my child."

  One could have heard a snowflake fall in that lamp-lit golden room.

  "She-Oale Niu-says there were caves or something in the cliffs an the western side of the valley." Hethya brought the words out hesitantly, as if dredging them from deep within her mind. "She says she and some other people, wizards I think, hid up there from the Dark Ones. They walled up things, weapons and ... and other things I'm not understanding, to hide them there from enemies, after they got the Keep built."

  The whole room was an indrawn breath. Hope, wanting, flashed between Rudy's eyes and Minalde's, palpable as the leap of summer lightning from cloud to cloud.

  Lord Ankres said, "But we have all been to those caves, my Lady Queen." He leaned forward, narrow hands resting on his knees. "Lord Ingold himself has gone carefully over them and found nothing but marks and scratches on the floor."

  Hethya looked puzzled, biting her lip.

  Rudy asked her, "Whereabouts are these caves? Down near the old road?"

  She shook her head immediately. "No, those were the ones the people stayed in, where there was the water. These were up higher, and farther on, I think. I'd know the place if I was to see it again."

  Rudy looked down at Tir, sitting rapt at Minalde's feet. "Any of this sound familiar to you, Ace?"

  The boy shook his head, eyes shining. "What kind of things?" he wanted to know. "Machines?"

  For the past two winters he had been enthralled by the mazes of levers and pulleys, belts and steam turbines, that Ingold was constructing in his laboratories in the heart of the Keep crypts next to the hydroponics gardens that fed the population.

  The few fragments of ancient machines that had been found provided only tantalizing scraps of information, hints and clues and the tiniest seeds of speculation, which, the Icefalcon knew, drove ingold and Gil insane.

  The Icefalcon himself had little opinion of machines. They could not be made to work and took up a deal of space, and, upon two or three occasions, trials of their virtues had resulted in nearly killing everyone in the room.

  Gil and Rudy had both attempted to explain to him why it was necessary that such machines as Gil saw in the record crystals from the Times Before should be made to work again, but the Icefalc
on still distrusted them.

  It was said among his people that it took a brave man to befriend a Wise Man, and after eleven years' friendship with Ingold Inglorion, greatest of the wizards of the West, the Icefalcon had concluded that one had to be slightly mad as well.

  Hethya was still speaking, telling Tir and Rudy and the Lady Alde about machines that would draw water from deep in the earth or generate heat and operate the pumps that circulated air and water through the unseen black ducts and pipes of the Keep.

  Though Maia was shaking his head in disapproval, she spoke of apparatus that would melt snow and cause plants to fruit and put forth crops twice and sometimes thrice in a year-the sort of things the more foolish of the people of the Real World west of the mountains attributed to their Ancestors, as if anyone's Ancestors would be interested in such matters. The Talking Stars People had more sense.

  "I know not whether these things will remain," Hethya said, the Felwoods brogue dissolving again, the antique inflection returning as the pitch of the voice itself deepened and slowed.

  "We hid them deep, for the world in those days was full of foolish men and the acts of a few evil wizards had brought down the persecution of the Church on them all. A world of time has passed over them, and time contains many things. We thought, me Uncle Linok and meself. . ."

  She was all Felwoods again. "We thought to lay hold of some of these things, to buy ourselves at least a place to dwell, now the eastern lands are all warfare and bandits and death."

  Her nostrils flared a little, and the hazel eyes darkened again, and her fingers clenched the faded gilding of her chair arm.

  "You need not trouble yourselves about the purchase of refuge." Alde rose from her own chair and held out her hand, her full garnet oversleeve falling straight.

  Against Hethya's height and strength she had a fragile look, like the chair she had sat in, the delicate workmanship of a world fast slipping away.

  "Whatever you seek, be sure that you will have our help. Whatever you find, be sure that it will not be taken from you so long as your use of it be honest. That I pledge you."

  Hethya curtsied deep with her borrowed skirts and kissed the Lady's outstretched hand. Linok carefully unwrapped himself from his many shawls and made his bow, an elaborate Court obeisance that once again tripped something in the Icefalcon's mind.

  But then, it was the sort of silliness that civilized people did, and he had lived among them for four years before the coming of the Dark Ones. There were many in the Keep-not just the Keep Lords, either-who scrupulously maintained the old forms, and it was not unreasonable to suppose that such a one might have a niece with a roving eye and a Felwoods turn to her tongue.

  It was the mark of civilized people to make such allowances and not live with one's hand forever on one's sword-belt. Commander Janus of the Guards, and the Lady Minalde, and others over the years, had told the Icefalcon repeatedly that every snapped twig did not necessarily presage the swift onset of bloody disaster.

  But the reflection that he was right, and they wrong, was of little consolation to the Icefalcon in the face of what was to come.

  Chapter 2

  "If you mean, do I think she was faking," said Gil-Shalos half an hour later, walking along the broad Royal Way at the Icefalcon's side with her gloved hands stuck in her sword-sash, "the answer is yes."

  At midday the mazes of the Keep were sparsely populated, especially in spring. The rasp of files and saws, characteristic noises that rose and faded with the turnings of the fortress' tangled hallways, were stilled as the men and women who labored all winter in their dim-lit cells joined hunting parties or optimistically cultivated what arable land there was-anything to add to the Keep's slim stores of food and, especially, clothing.

  With the destruction of the entire sheep herd in the Summerless Year, the Icefalcon had immediately reverted to the wearing of leather and furs, dyed black as the clothing of the Guards of Gae was always black; others were following suit.

  Uneasy torchlight flung shadows over the black stone walls but couldn't pierce the gloom collected under the high ceiling vaults. Here and there vermillion slits of poor-quality-oil light marked the rough louvers or curtains that closed off doors of the dwelling cells. Raised largely in the open, the Icefalcon had had a difficult time getting used to living under a roof in his years at Gae. The Keep was like dwelling forever in a cave.

  A very safe cave, of course. But a cave, nonetheless.

  But he had played in caves as a child, up in the Night River Country. He had memorized their most intricate twists and turnings, their tiniest holes and pass-throughs, in order to ambush his playmates, even as the children here learned to run the mazes without lights in the course of their games.

  He still practiced several times a week, finding his way about the back reaches of the Keep blindfolded. Following his example, as in many other things, Gil did this as well.

  "It is not exactly what I mean," the Icefalcon said, as they turned left and descended the Royal Stair. Many people had trouble keeping abreast of the Icefalcon's long-legged stride, but Gil was fast. "But tell me why you think this woman lies about the Ancestor who dwells within her head."

  "There's too much of a difference between her uncle's class and hers."

  "I thought of that. It is not inconceivable, O my sister, that the man's sister could have married beneath him."

  "Maybe." She didn't sound happy about it. She understood watchfulness as few civilized people did, the awareness of patterns and when a single trace or scat or spoor looked not as it should.

  "But anybody can make up gibberish and say it's an unknown language. Religious fakers in my world have been using that one for centuries. And logic would tell anybody that people had to live somewhere while the Keeps were being built. If you think about it, it would have to be in caves."

  The Icefalcon nodded. It was, he reflected, part of a storyteller's art, and he'd frequently teased Gil about the fascination a civilized people had for stories that sounded true but weren't.

  They passed under clotheslines draped with garments hung between the Royal Stair's spacious arches to take advantage of the updraft of warm air and on into the Aisle. Hundreds of yards long and over a hundred wide, its ceiling vanished high in darkness above them.

  The obsidian walls, like those of the densely twisted corridors, glittered dimly with squares of scattered lamplight; doors, and windows. Multifingered streams trickled dark and clear as winter midnight under railless stone bridges that cut the black expanses of floor.

  At the Aisle's far end, pale daylight leaked through the Doors, the single entrance to the whole of the Keep's great inner dark: two pairs of massive metal portals separated by the twenty- or thirty-foot thickness of the outer wall itself.

  Dare's Keep. The final stronghold. Unbreachable by the Dark that had shattered the world.

  "Both she and that uncle of hers have been eating pretty good," said Gil, and twisted a tendril of her dark hair around one of the sharpened sticks that held it out of the way.

  "And there's a limit to what you can pack on a donkey. But mostly what tips me off is that she thinks-or she says this Oale Niu bird says-that the Keep is powered by machinery. She thinks that the heart of the Keep is a machine. And that would be true for Keeps like Prandhays and the Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand. Keeps where a wizard, a mage, didn't sacrifice himself or herself to enter into the heart of the Keep as a source of magic to keep it going. If Oale Niu really were a mage from the Times Before, she'd know about that. She'd know about Brycothis."

  She spoke softly the name of the wizard who had sacrificed herself: Ancestor in a way, the Icefalcon thought, of all those who lived here. When first he had been told the secret of the Keep, known only to a handful, he wondered why he had not guessed it already.

  There was life here in the lamp-sprinkled midnight among the catwalks overhead, life in the flow of the moonless water along the streams of the floor, life in the breathing of the air. The life
of the Keep, like the spirits that dwelled in rocks and trees, in the ocean and in each of the thousand thousand stars. It was the only time he had heard of a human being transforming herself into a spirit, the ki of a place, but it did not surprise him.

  The spirit was the mage Brycothis, who had abandoned her body and been absorbed into the magic walls to draw power from the earth and channel it to the uses of her people within those walls forever.

  Sometimes he wondered that everyone in the Keep did not guess. At other times, after he had been dealing with these civilized people for a while-mud-diggers, the Talking Stars People called them, these people who had lived so long so fat and easily, with their wheat fields and their furniture and their clothing that tied up one's sword-hand-it did not surprise him at all. Civilized people would have trouble guessing what was amiss should a uintatherium take up residence in their parlors.

  "But why here?" he asked. "Why make up such a tale?"

  "Because we've got food here." Gil shrugged. "And we've got the only setup that guarantees production of food. Since those bandits took over Prandhays Keep last summer, we're just about the last stronghold for the length of the Great Brown River, from Penambra to the Ice in the North, and the most productive. You know how many bandits these days are from the Alketch, soldiers displaced by fighting there since the old Emperor's daughter gathered troops and threw out the general who thought marrying her against her will would be a good way to become Emperor himself, the more fool he."

  "They are fools," said the Icefalcon dismissively, "the Alketch." The original owner of the finger bones he wore in his braids had been a prince of the Alketch.

  A door in the Aisle's south wall, and a dark vestibule, led them into the watchroom of the Guards. The triple-sized cell was bright with glowstones-ancient crystal polyhedrons that shed a kind of stored magelight-and redolent of the warm reek of potatoes, venison stew, and sweaty wool. Sergeant Seya was playing pitnak with one of the rookies-Gil glanced at the sergeant's tiles and shook her head.