Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  "To your Straight God of civilized people." The Icefalcon adjusted the last of his accoutrements, his mind already on the ice-rimed rocks beyond the waterfall, the angle of wind in the pass. "He is the guardian of Tir's Ancestors, and of those who shelter in the Keep. The knowledge Tir carries may very well be the saving of them, should some peril arise in the future."

  "And what about your Ancestors, Ice?"

  He'd spoken of them to her, Black Hummingbird and Holds Lightning, and all those silent others whose blood stained the carved pillars of the crumbling Ancestor House at the foot of the Haunted Mountain. Had spoken of those ki that could be felt there in the close silences, or heard when the wind stirred the hanging fragments of bone and hair and wood.

  Noon, the warchief who had raised him, and the shaman Watches Water had spoken of their deeds around the fires of the winter steadings, with the eyes of the dogs glowing like lamps, for they listened, too.

  He was fond of Gil but was not sure she would understand how it was with Ancestors.

  "My Ancestors would think it only right that I pay for my stupidity with my life," he said in time.

  And Rudy's. And Tir's. And the lives of everyone in the Keep. That was the way Ancestors were-or the Icefalcon's Ancestors, anyway.

  "But I have not prayed to my Ancestors in eleven years," he went on slowly. "Nor would they listen now to supplication on my behalf. I sinned against them and against my people. And so I departed from the lands where I was born. I will be returning to those lands now, but it will be my death should I encounter my own people again."

  He embraced her briefly and then began his slow ascent of the icebound rocks, long pale braids snaking in the wind, to regain the way that would lead down Sarda Pass to the world he had forsaken forever.

  Chapter 4

  Eleven years previously, the Icefalcon had departed from the Talking Stars People, under circumstances which, if they did not absolutely preclude his return, guaranteed a comprehensively unpleasant welcome home.

  Because it was unreasonable to suppose that any of those who dwelt in the Real World-the Twisted Hills People, or the Earthsnake People, or those other peoples whom the mud-diggers referred to collectively as the White Raiders-would trust one whose Ancestors had been enemies of their Ancestors, there had really been no place for him to go but across the mountain wall in the east.

  As a child he had heard tales of the people of the straight roads, the mud-diggers, the dwellers in the river valleys, though the ranges of the Talking Stars People lay far north of the ragged line of mud digger mines and settlements that stretched from Black Rock among the Bones of God to Dele on the Western Ocean.

  Noon and Watches Water had told him the mud-diggers were crazy-which he had found later to be by and large true-and also lazy and stupid about important things, and almost unbelievably unobservant about the world around them.

  In the warm lands where water was easy to come by and plants were coaxed in abundance from the earth, there were kings and walls and warriors to protect those who didn't bother to learn to protect themselves. People could afford to be lazy and to make an art of telling fanciful stories about things that had never actually happened, at least for as long as the kings were alive and the walls were standing.

  After the coming of the Dark Ones things changed, of course. But in the high summer of his seventeenth year, when the Icefalcon made his way east over the pass that now he traveled west, the Dark Ones had been only one tale among many to the mud-diggers and in places not even that.

  In that summer the cover had been better, pale aspens bright among the firs, with brakes of hazel, dogwood, and laurel to conceal him and his horse. He'd moved mostly by twilight since the people of the straight roads kept guards in the pass at that time, fearing quite rightly the depredations of bandit troops from the West. In those days the Raiders had very little use for the mud-diggers' cattle. There had been gazelle and bison, red deer and wild sheep then in the northern plains.

  The Keep of Dare was the first structure the Icefalcon beheld on the sunrise side of the mountain wall. It had surprised him, he recalled, and smiled a little at the recollection. The houses of the mud diggers that he had seen before had all been wood structures of two or at most three floors, or in the South, low buildings of adobe roofed with pine poles or tiles. He had not expected the Keep. It was some time before he learned that civilized people on this side of the mountains did not all dwell in great dark solitary fortresses, untouchable by enemies.

  Sunrise found him in the thin stands of birch and aspen at the western foot of Sarda Pass. Reaching the place nearly an hour short of first light, he found a spot where chokecherry grew thick around the white boulders that marked the ascending road from the West and, crawling in, rolled himself up in Rudy's mantle and his own blanket to sleep. The snow lay behind him. Clouds piled the gray-and-white western cliffs of Anthir, and bitter wind nipped at him like a Wise One's leftover curse. He hoped Gil would be well.

  Squirrel chitter woke him. He had a sling tied around the bottom of his quiver, and it took him nearly two hours to kill four squirrels: spring wary, and spring thin as well, no more than a few mouthfuls each. Still he roasted them and ate everything that wouldn't keep: guts, hearts, brains. He'd need the meat later. Some of the innards he used as fish bait in the pools of one of the many springs that came down from Anthir's climbing maze of hogbacks and scarps, and the fish he caught he cooked also.

  Time-consuming, but he knew himself incapable of rescuing Tir alone if there were a Wise One in the enemy party, and the tracks of Bektis and Hethya weren't going to fly away. He shaved-his beard had not begun when he'd first crossed the mountains and he'd never liked going furry-and tried to bring down one of the raccoons that came to thieve his fish but failed in the endeavor.

  The sun was high before he filled his water bottle and Rudy's from the spring and set out on what he already knew would be a long pursuit.

  He'd taken three horses when he left the Talking Stars People, Little Dancer, whom he had owned for years, Sand Cat, and Dung For Brains. Sand Cat had been shot under him in a brush with Gettlesand bandits, and Dung For Brains he had killed himself when the animal went lame.

  His dog, Bright Feet, had also been killed by the bandits in Gettlesand: the spirit-bag he still wore under his clothing, next to his skin, contained some of Bright Feet's hair.

  He found horses corraled near the shining jet walls of the Keep, his first day in Renweth Vale. Stealing two was no difficult matter. These he'd named Brown Girl and Wind.

  Then, knowing he was going to live east of the wall for some time, he set himself to observe the mud-diggers who lived in the Vale. It became obvious to him at once that these were a war party of some sort, though he could not determine who their enemy was and where they lay.

  They had neither flocks nor herds (except for their horses), nor did they plant fields of the corn, cotton, and beans that grew in the mud-diggers' settlements in the South. They had a few dooic as slaves-the slumped, hairy semihumans that the Talking Stars People would have killed out of hand-but he did not see children among them, or old people, though that could have been accounted for by famine or plague.

  The men and women of the Keep, back in that far summer, wore either black clothing marked with a small white four-petaled flower or red with one or three black stars. There was a tall man who wore red much of the time and sported a chain of blue gems around his neck and a long black cloak that spread about him like wings when he walked, and he seemed to be in command of the men and women in red.

  It was a day or so before the Icefalcon realized that another man-equally tall but thin, clothed no differently from all the other wearers of black, save that the emblem on his breast was an eagle worked in gold-was commander over them all.

  This man was the one they called Eldor, or Lord Eldor, and this was the man who, the Icefalcon realized on his second day in the Vale, was stalking him.

  "It only needed that!" stormed Blue je
wels on that second day, when the two horses were reported missing. He made a great expansive angry gesture that would have startled game and drawn enemies for miles around, and Eldor folded his long arms and regarded him in self-contained quiet, his head a little on one side.

  "Bandits in the Vale! I told you how it would be did you reopen Dare's Keep, Lord Eldor. It dominates all the valley for miles. Instead of expending effort and supplies to make it fit for a larger garrison which I understand, with the depredations of the bandits growing in the West-you would do better to leave it locked and expand the fortifications at the western foot of the pass."

  His deep, melodious voice carried easily to where the Icefalcon lay along the limb of the great pine tree that still grew between the Keep and the stream. It was the custom of the Talking Stars People periodically to send warriors south to kidnap men from the settlements, whom they kept as prisoners for a winter to teach the children the tongue of the Wathe.

  These men they usually initiated into one or another of the families so that when the time of the spring sacrifices came nobody who had actually been born into the families had to be tortured to death, though the hair of such men usually wasn't long enough to make good bowstrings.

  "As sure as the Ice in the North," Blue jewels went on, "if you leave the Keep open, either bandits will take it as a hold or some troublemaker landchief will."

  "If it was bandits." The tall Lord Eldor followed the offending sentry back to the horse lines, speaking to Blue jewels as they walked. "Tomec Tirkenson tells me bandits as a rule are too greedy for their own good. They'll lift the whole herd, not two out of the middle where they wouldn't be noticed until the count."

  After a little more bluster, Blue Jewels-whom the Icefalcon later knew as Alwir of the House of Bes, one of the wealthiest and most powerful lords of the Realm-ordered out a party of his red-clothed warriors to search the Vale, and the Icefalcon made his leisurely way back to his camp near the standing-stones, to move it before they got there.

  He later came to know both Eldor and Alwir well, but it sometimes seemed to him that all the years of acquaintance only deepened, rather than altered, his initial impression of them: Alwir declaiming and jumping to an incorrect conclusion, Eldor standing a little distance from him, withholding judgment, an expression of observation and a detached amusement in his steel-colored eyes.

  Winter still held the land below the pass. The Real World that stretched between the Snowy Mountains and the Seaward was an unforgiving land, a land of little water in most places and few trees, a land of hard, steady winds punctuated by summer tornadoes and, so he had heard, of winter ice storms these past ten years that tore man and beast to shreds and froze them where they fell.

  Herds of bison and antelope wandered the open miles of grassland, and as the winters lengthened and deepened, mammoth, yak, reindeer, and rhinoceri joined them, followed by the great killers: dire wolves, saber-teeth, horrible-birds. Since the Summerless Year slunch had spread, the wrinkled, rubbery, faintly glowing sheets of it swallowing the ground for miles, sucking the life from any plant it engulfed. The slunch in its turn put forth a kind of life, strange creatures that wandered abroad but did not appear to either eat, or seed, or excrete. These things died and rotted with a strange, mild, sweetish stench and left patches of slunch where they lay.

  The Icefalcon's hackles raised like a dog's to see how the slunch and the cold had altered the land. Many of the groves that dotted the western foothills were now dead, buried under the whitish masses. As he followed the westward road that first day, the stuff stretched on both sides, in patches or in sheets miles broad, and neither rabbits, nor lemmings, nor antelope moved over the dying grass that lay between.

  By the debris left where Bektis and his party stopped to rest, the Icefalcon learned that in addition to what Bektis and Hethya had carried on their two donkeys they'd helped themselves to the Keep's stores of dried meat, cheese, and potatoes. With his sling he killed two kites that came down after the cheese rinds and potato parings and added their meat to his satchel, and the rinds and parings as well.

  With slunch growing abroad in the lands food would be even more difficult to find, and he knew he could waste none. Only in the camps did he see Tir's tracks and guessed by the marks in the thin dust that they were keeping the boy's hands tied.

  In a way it was just as well, he thought. Whatever Gil might say, the boy might have tried to escape while the mountains still loomed in the east, and his chances of survival would be nil in these desolate lands.

  After black-cloaked Alwir with his blue jewels had declared him to be a bandit, hunting parties went out to search the Vale of Renweth for the Icefalcon for three days running. The Icefalcon had been more amused than anything else, patiently moving his camp every few hours-the invisible camp of the peoples of the North, which left no sign on the land-and watching them.

  He watched, too, the trains of mules that came up the gorge of the Arrow River through the smaller range of peaks west of the Vale, food and seed and saplings; watched the training of the black-clothed Guards under the tutelage of a little bald-headed man with a hoarse voice; watched Alwir and Eldor walk around the walls of the Keep and the edges of the woods that surrounded its knoll, talking and making notes on tablets wrought of wood and wax.

  Alwir continued to complain of the size of the Keep and its uselessness as a garrison against the Gettlesand bandits. "In times of siege it's a jail!" he declared, striding up and down the shallow steps that led to its single pair of dark metal Doors. "To be sure, no one can get in, but the defenders are trapped! Unless there's a secret way out? A tunnel for sorties, perhaps, or a hidden door?"

  His blue eyes glinted eagerly. He was a man who loved secrets, thought the Icefalcon, lying in the long grass beside the stream. Himself, he would never have entrusted any secret to this Alwir, who seemed to consider himself above the laws of common men by virtue of his descent from the lordly House of Bes.

  "None that I know of," replied Eldor calmly and went on with his surveying, knee-deep in the long meadow grass.

  This Eldor was a man of thirty-five, as tall as Alwir and just slightly taller than the Icefalcon himself, who at seventeen was an inch or so short of his final growth. Eldor wore his brown hair cut off about his shoulders, as was the fashion of civilized people, and had an air of lean strength. Sometimes he would fight practice bouts with his warriors, either the black-clothed or the red.

  Observing them in the light of the fires and torches-which illuminated the whole western face of the Keep and would have made them an easy target for the arrows of any foe on earth-or in the twilight before full dark, the Icefalcon saw with approval the hard stringency of the teaching.

  The lithe bald man in charge corrected and explained and shouted criticism as if the combatants were stupid children barely able to bat one another with clubs, or put them through endless drills with weighted weapons that the Icefalcon quickly saw were designed to most quickly and efficiently increase their strength and speed.

  It was a method of teaching he had never encountered among his own people, and it fascinated him. He would go down to the camp by the black walls every evening, after the work of planting and clearing had been done and after the stupid patrols had been called in, and he would watch them for hours.

  In his own camp he whittled a sword of the length they were using, with a two-handed hilt, balanced differently from the short stabbing-swords used on the plain and made for a different sort of warfare. He practiced everything he had seen the previous night, timing himself against the calls of the night-birds or striking against a tree trunk.

  Then he would go back and listen, and heard for the first time the music these people made, with harps and pipes, different from the simple reed flutes of his people, intricate and beautiful if completely useless.

  They would also tell tales, of valor and violence and love, and it was some time before he realized that these were made up and had never really happened to anyone. It w
as an art with them, he learned later-and also among Gil's people, evidently-to make such fictions sound as if they were true. The tales of civilized people were beautiful and fascinated the Icefalcon in spite of himself, but he told himself they were useless.

  Then one night the Icefalcon had returned to his camp to find Wind and Little Dancer gone.

  That Eldor hadn't taken all three animals, as one would do to an enemy, outraged him. I think you'll need a horse, it implied. That he had left Brown Girl, the worst of the three, was a slap, given teasingly, as a man might slap a boy in jest. And he knew it was Eldor who had taken them. While he was watching the sparring in the evening, he thought, annoyed, as he searched the place the next morning for tracks.

  He found them, but it was difficult. The man had covered his traces well. Eldor had distracted him with the large search parties while making solitary reconnaissance of his own.

  The Icefalcon guessed they were expecting him to try to steal back Little Dancer, at least, from the cavvy. They always tethered her and Wind in the middle. He noticed the Guards were now more numerous. So he waited and watched, until one evening Eldor rode forth from the Keep alone on Wind, a tall black stallion that the Icefalcon had seen was a favorite of his. He followed him up the meadows to the rising ground above the Keep and shot him in the back with an arrow.

  The Icefalcon smiled again, thinking about it now as he made a cold camp in the ditch beside the west-leading road.

  Of course Eldor had been wearing armor, steel plate sandwiching a core of cane and overlaid with spells of durability and deflection. If it hadn't been twilight, blue shade filling the long trough of Renweth Vale like a lake of clear dark water, he'd have seen the awkward fit of the man's surcoat or wondered why in summer he'd worn a cloak.

  Eldor had carried a pig's bladder of blood, too, and smashed it as he fell from Wind's back, so the Icefalcon smelled blood from where he hid in the trees. He'd thought it sheer bad luck that his victim had fallen on the reins, holding the horse near. The "corpse" had hooked his feet out from under him and put a knife to his throat. The Icefalcon never believed in bad luck again.