Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  "If our girl Hethya was passing herself off as some kind of ancient wizard to gain status wherever she lived," she continued, turning back to the Icefalcon, "Alketch bandits' religious scruples might not have stretched to keeping her around, especially once they found out she couldn't come across with anything useful. You know what the Church in the South does to wizards. My bet is she and Uncle Linok had to get out of there fast."

  "So they stole a donkey," said the Icefalcon, "and came here ... For what purpose? To hoax us?"

  "At a guess. To buy status. Maybe they thought we wouldn't let them in. Everyone loves a good story."

  "Civilized people do," retorted the Icefalcon, who wasn't about to admit to a weakness of that kind. "They could make a good living," he added thoughtfully, "just selling the donkey."

  Knowing some of the speculators who operated in the Keep, Linok had probably already been offered the little animal's weight in gold, which was cheap these days, since it would neither hold an edge nor stand up to the heat of a cook fire. It was just possible that someone would make an attempt to steal the creature, though with so few animals in the Keep, such a theft would be difficult to hide.

  It occurred to him that he could have killed both the old man and the woman and sold the donkey himself to the highest bidder, always supposing anyone in the Keep possessed anything he wanted that badly.

  None of the Talking Stars People were particularly interested in things they couldn't carry two hundred miles on foot. The habits of the Icefalcon's upbringing died hard.

  Gnift the Swordmaster came in, calling together his afternoon practice, and now that her son Mithrys was able to walk-and learning to talk, may their Ancestors help them all-Gil had returned to training regularly with the Guards and taking her turn on the watches.

  While she and the others were stripping to their undertunics and wrapping their hands and wrists, the Icefalcon again put on the soft jerkin of black-dyed wolf-hide he wore on patrol, marked with the white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards of Gae, and pulled on over it a heavier vest, and his gloves.

  Though it was April, in these high valleys the wind blew cold, colder now every year. There was still chance of snow.

  Janus, the stocky, red-haired Commander, called out, "You're not on now, you know," and the Icefalcon shrugged.

  "I'm just going up the Vale to see about those bandits."

  "There can't be a lot of them." He straightened up from lacing his boots. "The watchers at the Tall Gates never saw them. Neither have any of the patrols."

  "Even so." He gathered up his bow, a blanket, a quiver of arrows, and then, because he had been raised among the Talking Stars People, added to the sword and water bottle at his belt a leather wallet of dried meat and flatbread, enough for a hard day's walking, and some dried fruit. Like most of the Guards he carried a firepouch at his belt, the whole cured hide of a woodchuck lined with horn and clay, in which was packed a smolder of rotted yellow birch that would burn for a day.

  There were few enough guards, and Renweth Vale stretched eighteen miles from the sapphire wall of the St. Prathhes' Glacier down to the spruce forest at its lower end. A fairly large force might hide in the pinewoods or the rock caves above, and it was not impossible they could have come in over the ice-crowned spine of the peaks, rather than the eastward pass.

  It would be as well to know where they were and what they were up to. The regular patrol had departed only an hour before the Icefalcon briefly considered rounding up a band to go with him, then dismissed the thought. On simple reconnaissance, he would do better alone.

  Besides, he thought-the reasoning of a White Raider, Ingold would tell him, but he was a White Raider, and the reasoning was logical-bandits might have weapons and horses that could be appropriated.

  Instinct made him seek the trees as quickly as he could. From the stones called the Four Ladies at the glacier's foot one could see all the clear land of the Vale. He worked his way carefully under cover of the woods up to the round meadow where Linok and Hethya had camped.

  He did not seriously think that anyone was watching from the Four Ladies, but there was no point in giving anyone a hint of his movements or intentions.

  He had not seen tracks of bandits yesterday, he thought, nor the day before. The watchers on the Tall Gates that guarded the lower pass to the east had not sighted them, either.

  Odd.

  From the edge of the trees he scanned the pale sky northward, orienting himself. His upbringing in the Real World had taught him to learn every facet of his surroundings, tree by tree, gully by gully, mudflat, spring, and stone. He knew Renweth Vale as well as he knew the ranges of his childhood, the Haunted Mountains and the Night River Country.

  Had the sky-shadowing devil-birds of legend carried him off and set him down anywhere in the range of the Talking Stars People, he would have been able to determine where he was, where the nearest cover lay, where to find water and in what direction to walk to come to the steadings and horse herds of his people were it winter, or their summer hunting camps wherever they might be, depending on the rains and the grass.

  Therefore he knew exactly where the lightning-scarred elm tree and its three sisters lay.

  And above them, there were no carrion birds.

  Scrupulous bandits? In his experience bandits didn't even bury their camp garbage, let alone their dead.

  When he wanted to, the Icefalcon could travel very swiftly, but the terrain here was rough, cut with streams and dotted with pale boulders among the trunks of pine and fir. It took him over an hour to reach the place, and when he did the sun was barely a hand span above the marble-white knife of the Great Snowy Mountains in the West.

  The bandit still lay at the meadow's edge, arms flung wide, head twisted over to the side. Both face and head had been shaved a little less than a week before, and though the man's face was young, the beard and hair stubble were white, a common color among the Black Alketch.

  No bird had torn his eyes or his belly, no fox chewed the soft parts of his face. Nothing, as far as the Icefalcon could see, had invaded the gaping flesh of the severed throat or begun to eat at the corpse. It had simply rotted where it lay.

  In four hours?

  He knelt beside it, pulled off his glove to touch the cheek. Liquefying flesh had already begun to drip away, showing the pale jawbone and teeth.

  Plague?

  Not a pleasant thought. Particularly not with Ingold a week's journey off in Gae seeking Harilomne the Heretic's books. This man had seemed healthy enough to try to rape Hethya, if that had indeed been his intent.

  He pulled off the man's glove, and most of the hand's flesh came with it. The odor alone told him that all was not as it should be. The wars with the other peoples of the northern plains, the torture sacrifices by which his people periodically communicated with the Ancestors, the hunts of mammoth and dire wolf and yak, would have been enough to teach him the stench of the dead, without the Time of the Dark when corpses lay like windfall plums in the streets.

  This stink was only vaguely similar, not like human flesh at all. He sat back on his heels. Birds were beginning to cry their territories before settling in for the night. A squirrel ran up a tree.

  The bandits had gone.

  The sun slipped behind the white horns of the glaciers that shawled Anthir, northernmost of the three peaks that guarded Sarda Pass. Blue shadow poured east to drown the Vale, though light still filled the sky. The Icefalcon rose and traced the bandit's prints back into the trees.

  Here, where the yellow pine-straw covered the ground, there was no good surface for tracks, a situation not helped by the fact that the bandit had not worn boots. Like the poorest beggars in Gae before the Dark Ones came, he had wrapped his feet in strips of hide. Still, where the man's marks crossed one of the dozen meltwater streams, the Icefalcon found in the mud of the water's verge the tracks of three others.

  All four had stood there together, not long before the one bandit had gone to meet Hethya, Linok,
and his destiny in the clearing. The other men had gone southwest.

  The Icefalcon frowned. The light was sufficiently dim that he had to crouch for a closer look.

  There was no mistaking it. All four men were the same height, judging by the length of their strides, and all four exactly the same weight.

  The Icefalcon had grown up able to differentiate between the tracks of his grandfather's white mare Blossom Horse and those of his cousin's mare Flirt and those of any other horse owned by anyone in the family. He had been able to recognize the prints of individual dogs, of anyone in the family or in the larger People, and of many of the members of the wild herds of reindeer, yak, bison, and mammoth as well.

  Tracks, and scat, and individual habits of beasts were the topic of most conversations around the longhouse fires in winter and under the summer stars while hunting in the Cursed Lands or the Night River Country. They were the heart and business of the Real World, told over the way civilized people told over Gil's useless tales of enchantment and romance. The Icefalcon could no more have been mistaken than he could have thought that a prairie chicken's feather belonged to a red-tailed hawk.

  Three of the four bandits had wrapped their feet in the same way, and the hide wrappings were thin enough to show him that they all walked in the same fashion as well. Not just that they all toed in slightly, but that they all put their weight on their heels in the same way. Had all worn boots, the pattern of wear on the soles would have been identical.

  Brothers?

  No brothers he had ever encountered had been that similar. Save for those of the bandit he had killed, all turned upstream. There was a path along the gorged mountain flank that would take them to Sarda Pass and the little-used way that led down into the plains and badlands of the West.

  Why that way? He couldn't be sure, for the light was more and more uncertain, but he thought the hide wrappings were new. The dead man's were, without ragged edges or the blurring of long wear.

  Disquieted, the Icefalcon got to his feet and drew the bandit's dagger from his belt. Alketch work, beautifully tooled and quite old. He called to mind the bandit's clothing, yellow coat and crimson breeches, slightly too big, looted from an earlier wearer. Boots were expensive and required more work to accommodate to another size.

  Then he realized what it was that had tugged at his mind about Linok, what it was about him that he had recognized, or thought he recognized.

  It was too dark to see tracks in the meadow now, and in any case there might be very little time. Turning, he made his way toward the Keep at a run.

  The Icefalcon was one of the tallest men in the Keep, long-boned and rangy, and he ran fast. He was still a mile from its walls when he saw blue witchlight dance in the meadow by the stream, and voices carried to him, too far to make out words, but recognizable in their timbre and pitch. He turned aside, his heart cold in him with dread. There was only one reason people would be outside the Keep after nightfall.

  Though the Dark Ones had been gone for seven years, the trauma of their coming ran deep. Almost no one who had passed through that horror would willingly remain outside of shelter once twilight gathered. Moreover, with the Sunless Year had come changes in the world.

  Huge patches of slunch emitted a sicklied radiance all along the valley's floor, and the mutant creatures that grew from it were not all harmless. Even without such beings, there were always the perils of the mountains themselves: dire wolves, saber-teeth, the bears that were coming out of hibernation, now thin and hungry and angry.

  Fog lay in the low ground of the meadows, dense and white. The moon would not rise for some hours. The voices came clearer, and the magefire showed him the faces of the man and woman scanning the damp earth for tracks.

  "Sometimes he goes exploring where the old road used to run along the west foothills," said the voice he recognized as Rudy Solis'.

  They're talking about Tir.

  "He says sometimes he remembers things there."

  Gil-Shalos. In seven years they had almost completely dropped the tongue of their own world, even when speaking to one another, save for words that had no translation in the Wathe, like tee-vee and car and Academy Awards

  "You think he might have gone out with Hethya? I saw her talking to him."

  "He might have, if she described something he thought he recognized."

  "Yeah, but why wouldn't I have..."

  Even as Rudy was speaking the words, the Icefalcon was thinking, Why would Rudy need to search? He's a Wise One. He has his scrying stone. He should be able to call Tir's image ...

  Unless Tir is with another Wise One.

  He'd guessed before, but the confirmation was like taking an arrow in the chest.

  "It's Bektis." He stepped out of the trees. Gil-Shalos was already turning. No fool, she.

  "Bektis?" She looked nonplussed as she spoke the name of the Court Mage who had years ago sold his services to the power-mad Archbishop Govannin, had followed her to the Alketch and, so rumor said, had assisted her when she carved an unshakable sphere of influence in those war-torn lands.

  "What does Bektis have to do with Tir being gone?"

  The Icefalcon hadn't even broken stride, forcing Rudy and Gil to fall into step with him as he led the way fast through the knee-deep ground fog and on toward rising ground, the shouldering bones of the hills that guarded Sarda Pass and the road down into the West.

  "We have been had for dupes." The Icefalcon's voice was bitter, anger at himself tempered by fear.

  "Made fools of by a shaman's illusion. The old man Linok was Bektis the Sorcerer. I thought I recognized his voice and the way he stroked his beard. Were we to waste time going back across the meadows we would find his tracks-long and thin, not the tracks of the little short-legged man we saw. The whole thing was a fakement, a lure, a tale, so that he could get into the Keep."

  Gil swore. Rudy, who was a little slower on the uptake, said, "Well, I'll be buggered. But he isn't in the Keep. He and that broad Hethya disappeared about two hours ago..."

  Gil concluded for him, guessing, but at the same time sure. "And they took Tir with them."

  Chapter 3

  "I was a fool," said the Icefalcon.

  It didn't take them long to cut Bektis' tracks. Snow still lay thin where the shadows of the Hammerking mountain fell on the trail, and the prints of the old man's boots were there, long and narrow, with the heel and nail-work characteristic of Alketch bootmaking.

  Prints that had to be Hethya's mingled with the wizard's, along with the marks of a second donkey, and the three identical bandits with hide wrapped around their feet.

  "Where's Tir?" Rudy held his staff close to the sparkling ground. The magelight playing around the pronged metal crescent at its tip glittered on the crisp edges of the new prints.

  "On a donkey." Gil forestalled the Icefalcon's reply. Night wind coming down cold off the glacier tore long wisps of her smoke-black hair where it escaped from the leather cap she wore.

  "We're lucky the herdkids were just bringing in the horses from pasture when Bektis was getting ready to get out of there, or we'd have lost a couple for sure." She bore a lantern and a firepouch like the Icefalcon's, though the lantern was dark; like the Icefalcon, Gil believed in never making assumptions about who she'd be walking with or what she might need.

  Some way farther, they saw Tir's tracks where he'd gotten off the donkey to relieve himself behind a boulder.

  "Are they keeping a guard on him?" The Icefalcon scanned the ground by the witchlight's glow, seeking other tracks near the small boot prints, the little puddle of frozen urine.

  "My guess is Bektis has an illusion on him." In the bluish witchlight Gil's thin face, scarred across cheek and jaw, was impassive, her gray eyes steely-cold. "He probably thinks Rudy's with him and that everything's okay."

  Rudy cursed. He'd been silent most of the way up the glacis, but the Icefalcon knew that the Prince was like a son to the young wizard and that Alde would be frantic with anxi
ety for her child.

  Winds blew down the peaks, pregnant with the scent of coming snow. Not unusual for this time of year, reflected the Icefalcon bitterly, but too useful to a Wise One fleeing over the pass to be accidental.

  "I should have known him," he said grimly, "long before they reached the Keep."

  Gil regarded him in surprise. "How could you?" she asked. "Wend and Ilae-even Rudy-didn't see through the illusion. I didn't, and I saw him just two years ago in Khirsrit."

  "Neither Wend nor Ilae ever saw him before the Wizards Corps was organized for the war against the Dark." He moved off again, leaning a little against the iron hammer of the wind, a bleached, silent moving animal in the wild dark.

  "Nor did you, or Rudy, know him much longer. Not to know his voice, or his manner of movement. Not to recognize the way in which he speaks. As court mage to Lady Alde's brother he was about the palace from the time of my coming there. I knew him well. And in any case," he added dryly, realizing too late yet another truth, "why would they have camped for the night within five miles of the Keep they claimed to be seeking? I should have recognized a fakement when I saw one."

  "Bektis is a wizard," retorted Gil. "It's his job to deceive. Don't be so hard on yourself."

  She tucked her hands under her armpits, cold despite the gloves she wore. She was a thin woman, all bone and leather; cold until you saw her smile. Many of the Guards had affairs with the women of the Keep, the weavers and brewers and leather workers and those who tended the hydroponics gardens.

  The Icefalcon's affairs, when he had them, tended to be with women in the Guards or in the military companies of the other Keep Lords. At one time he had considered Gil, though it had been obvious to him from the first that her heart was given elsewhere. His only serious love, many years ago, had been so also, and this time he had not deceived himself.

  Now he returned her gaze with some surprise. "I speak only truth," he said. "Had I gone about my business and left these people to their own devices, the Keep would not now be in danger of losing its link with the memories of its Ancestors."