Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  "Alwir thinks you're a scout from a bandit gang," Eldor said, without relaxing his grip. "But you're alone, aren't you?"

  The Icefalcon said nothing. He supposed if he had to die at least this was better than the fate he left among the Talking Stars People, but his own stupidity filled him with anger.

  "I've heard you people don't ride with bandits."

  Still nothing. It was true that none of the people of the Real World had much use for bandits, not wanting the possessions that lawless folk so stupidly craved, but it was not the way of his people to speak with enemies.

  "I don't want to kill you," said Eldor, though he didn't relax his grip or move the knife. "It would be a waste of a good warrior, and I need good warriors. I saw the practice posts you've made at your camps, to go over for yourself what Gnift has been teaching the Guards lately. Would you like to learn?"

  The Icefalcon considered the matter and pointed out, "I am your enemy."

  Eldor released him then and got up very quickly, stepping clear even as the Icefalcon rolled to his feet. "Why?" he asked.

  The Icefalcon thought about the reasons that he had left the Talking Stars People and about where he might go, and what he might do, now that it was impossible for him to go back. He found that he did not have any reply to Eldor's question.

  Eldor Endorion.

  The Icefalcon drank a little water and settled himself in the bayberry that grew in the ditch. The silence of the prairie drifted over him. He listened, identifying the crying of the coyotes and the greater voices of wolves farther off, the susurration of the ceaseless wind and the smell of dust and growing needlegrass.

  The world of his childhood reassembling itself, scent by scent and sound by sound in the darkness.

  He was home.

  Eldor Endorion.

  He hadn't been at all surprised to learn that the man who had overpowered him, the man who had put himself in danger in order to trap a possible spy, was in fact the High King of the Wathe. Even when he learned the size of the Realm, and the rich complexity of the world Eldor ruled, he had felt no surprise at the acts.

  They were typical of the man.

  Eldor remained an extra week in Renweth Vale with the men and women he had sent to regarrison and reprovision the Keep, in order to train with the Icefalcon, to get to know him, to test him as leaders test warriors whom they seek to win to their sides. The Icefalcon had trained hawks. He knew what Eldor was doing.

  He never felt toward the King the reverence that the other Guards did or stood in awe of that darkly blazing personality. But he knew the man was trustworthy and respectworthy to the core of his being. He was content to attach himself to the Guards.

  He spent four years in the city of Gae, training with the Guards. He exchanged his wolf-hide and mammoth-wool clothing for the fine dense sheep-wool uniforms, black with their white quatrefoil flowers; wore the hard-soled boots of civilized men (though they were less comfortable than moccasins and left more visible tracks). When his beard came in the following year, he shaved, as civilized men did, though he never cut his hair. He learned to use a long killing-sword and to fight in groups rather than alone.

  In Gae he met Ingold, Eldor's old tutor, unobtrusively mad and-he quickly learned-probably the finest swordsman in the west of the world. He saw him first sparring on Gnift's training floor and took him for some shabby old swordmaster down on his luck, which was what he invariably looked like. Later, after he trounced the Icefalcon roundly, they'd have long discussions about animal tracks, the habits of bees, and where grass grew.

  Just to watch the High King spar with the Wise One was an education. Now and then he would see Alwir's sister about the palace compound, a pretty, quiet schoolgirl who read romances and never left her governess' side and had not a word to say for herself. Three years after his arrival in Gae she was married to Eldor, for the benefit of both their houses. Their child was Tir.

  Though no one knew it, time was running out for civilized folk, like water from a cracked jar.

  It was during this time, too, that he became acquainted with Bektis, who was much more a fixture at court than Ingold. Ingold was in and out of the city, but Bektis had a suite of chambers in Alwir's palace in the district of the city called the Water Park-less crowded and smelly than the rest of Gae, which had taken the Icefalcon years to get used to.

  Bektis scried the future and the past (he said) and learned through magic of things far away, and he also worked the weather for court fetes and advised Alwir about shipping ventures, something that made the Wise Ones mistrusted by merchants and farmers throughout the civilized realms.

  Shamans among the Icefalcon's people also worked the weather, insofar as they would avert the worst of the storms from the winter settlements and the horse herds, but such workings were known to be dangerous. Besides, working the weather might let enemies guess where you camped.

  Alwir and Bektis referred to the Icefalcon as "Lord Eldor's Tame Barbarian" and made little jests about the things that were, to him, simply logical, like always having weapons and a day's supply of food on his person, keeping to corners and never being where he could not immediately get out of a room. Their jokes did not offend him. Merely they informed him that they were fools, as most of the people of the straight roads were either mad or fools.

  And most of them died with the coming of the Dark Ones.

  Wind moved over the land, bitterly cold. Above the overcast that veiled the sky most nights now, the waning moon was a ravel of luminous wool. It had taken the Icefalcon most of a year to separate the reflexive terror about being outdoors after nightfall, developed by those who had passed through the Time of the Dark, from the reasonable wariness he had possessed before.

  Now he listened, identifying sounds and smells, gauging the scent of greenery and water somewhere beyond the slunch to the northwest that meant he might hunt tomorrow, measuring it against the certainty that there would be predators there as well. A small glowing thing like a detached head on two legs ran by along the top of the ditch-most slunch-born things glowed a little. A night-bird skimmed past, hunting moths.

  Tir was out there in the dark, in the camp with Bektis and Hethya and those three identical black warriors.

  Eldor's son.

  Eldor was not the kin of the Icefalcon's ancestors. By the standards of the Talking Stars People, he would be considered an enemy. But he had not been. And he was the only person in Gae-the only person in all that new life the Icefalcon had lived among civilized people for four years-to whom he had spoken about why he had left the Talking Stars People and why he could not go back.

  Speaking to him had made him less of an enemy. But what he would be called, the Icefalcon did not know.

  The Dark Ones ringed this place.

  Tir forced his eyes open, forced himself to look out past the campfire that seemed to him so pitifully inadequate; forced himself to look out into the darkness.

  They aren't really there.

  He had never actually seen the Dark Ones. Not that he remembered by himself-his mother had told him they'd all gone away when he was a little baby. Sometimes in nightmares he'd be aware of them, amorphous waiting stirrings in the shadows and a smell that scared him when he smelled things like it sometimes, some of the things the women of the Keep used to clean clothing with.

  He saw them now. The memory was overwhelming, like a recollection of something that had happened to him only yesterday: clouds of darkness that blotted the moon, winds that came up suddenly, seeming to blow from every direction at once, carrying on them the wet unnatural cold, the blood and ammonia stink.

  On this very stream bank-only the gully wasn't this deep then, and the stream's waters had lain closer to the surface, gurgling and glittering in the light of torches, a ring of torches-he had watched them pour across the flat prairie grass like floodwaters spreading and had felt his heart freeze with sickened horror and the knowledge that there was no escape. They aren't really there.

  He faced ou
t into the darkness, and the darkness was still.

  The memory retreated a little. He felt weak with shock and relief.

  "For the love o' God, Bektis," said Hethya, "let the poor tyke eat." She stood in the firelight, hair dark except where the reflected glare made brassy splinters in it, red mouth turned down with irritation.

  Bektis said, "I'm not going to risk the child running away." He was rubbing and polishing the device that he wore over his right hand with a chamois; the great jointed encrustation of crystals and gold locked around his wrist, gemmed the back of his hand and his arm, and the knuckles of two of his fingers, with slabs and nodules of coruscant light.

  Polishing meticulously, obsessively, now with the leather and now with one of the several stiff brushes he took from his satchel, as if he feared that a single fleck of grease from dinner-which Hethya had cooked-would lessen its lethal power.

  He had killed Rudy with it. Tir shut his eyes.

  He had killed Rudy.

  When he shut his eyes he could still see his friend, his mother's friend, the man who was the only father he'd known.

  Hand lifted, the pronged crescent of the staff he bore flashing light, levin-fire showing up the crooked-nosed face, the wide dark eyes. Working magic, fighting Bektis' spells so that he could rescue him, Tir, get him away from those people who'd somehow made him think that Rudy was with them all the way up the pass, that Rudy was there telling him it was okay to go with them.

  He could still see the fake Rudy melting and changing into a black-skinned bald man, a man he'd never seen before, like those two other identical black warriors who'd come out of the woods to follow them toward the pass. Could still feel their hands on him, grabbing him when he tried to jump down from the donkey and run.

  Then Rudy had been there, with Gil and the Icefalcon, witchlight showing them up among the rocks and snow and inky shadows of the pass. Rudy running, zigzagging away from the lightning bolts Bektis threw at him, straightening up to hurl fire from the head of his staff, crying out words of power.

  The lightning bolt had hit him. And he'd fallen. Tir clamped his teeth hard to keep from crying.

  "Here you go, sweeting." He heard the rustle of Hethya's clothes-she'd changed back into trousers and a man's tunic and coat-and smelled the scent of her, thicker and sweeter than a man's. He smelled, too, the roasted meat and the potatoes she carried in a gourd bowl and opened his eyes.

  "Please untie me," he whispered. He wriggled his wrists a little in the rawhide bonds, trying to ease the pain. The coarse leather had blistered his skin during the day and the slightest pressure was a needle of fire.

  "I'm sorry, me darling." She picked a fragment of meat from the dish; she'd already cut it up for him. "His High-And-Mightiness seems to think you'll run off, and then where would we all be?" She blew on the meat to cool it. Steam curled from it, white in the firelight.

  "Please." He tried not to sound scared, but panic scratched behind the shut doors in his mind. The Dark Ones coming. The wizards in the camp setting out flares, setting out what looked like stones, gray lumps woven around with tangled tentacles of iron and light.

  Fire columning up from them, the wizards' faces illuminated, tattooed patterns lacing their shaved skulls and grim fear in their eyes. His father's warriors bracing themselves with their flamethrowers and swords, and the one wizard who'd been engulfed by those rubbery tentacles, falling away from their grip only a heap of red-stained, melted, smoking bones.

  It was only a memory. It had happened thousands of years ago. The Dark Ones weren't coming back.

  Hethya made a growl in her throat, glanced back at Bektis, and pushing Tir around by his shoulders, yanked the knots free of the bindings. The rawhide jerking away brought tears to his eyes, and the cold in the open cuts was excruciating.

  She turned him around back. "Just till you finish eating, mind," she said.

  Tir whispered, "Thank you."

  "Not so fast, child."

  Bektis rose from his place by the fire, crossed to where Hethya sat tailor-fashion in front of Tir, Tir kneeling with the food bowl between his knees. Tir got to his feet; Hethya too.

  Tir tried hard to keep his voice steady. "I won't run away. I just..." He couldn't finish. Couldn't tell this tall bearded man how badly it terrified him, not to have the use of his hands, not to be able to run in this place where the Dark had descended on them, this place at the far end of that blind corridor of memories.

  Bektis said softly, "See that you don't."

  The flourish of his arm, wrist, and elbow leading-like Gingume at the Keep who'd been an actor in Penambra before the Dark came, seemed to reach out, to gather in the formless prairie night.

  Gold eyes flashed there. Ground mist and shadow coalesced. Something moved.

  Tir's heart stood still.

  "You know what I am, don't you, child?" murmured Bektis. "You know what I can do. I know the names of the wolfen-kind; I can summon the smilodonts from their lairs and the horrible-birds from where they nest in the rocks. At my bidding they will come."

  The camp was surrounded with them. Huge, half-unseen shaggy shapes, snuffing just out of the circle of the firelight. Elsewhere the glint of foot-long fangs. A snarl like ripping canvas. Tir glanced back, again, despairingly, at the pitiful handful of flames, the three black warriors crouched beside it, staring around them into the dark with worried silver-gray eyes.

  Hethya put her arms over his shoulders, pulled him to her tight. "Quit terrifyin' the boy, you soulless hellkite." She ruffled Tir's hair comfortingly. "Don't you worry, sweeting." Bektis glared at her for silence-after hesitation she said, "Just you stay inside the camp and you'll be well."

  Stomach churning with fright, Tir looked from her face to Bektis' cold dark eyes, then to the lightless infinity beyond the fire's reach. Movement still padded and sniffed in the long grass. Waiting for him. He didn't want to-she'd kidnapped him, dragged him away here, lied to him, she was part of Bektis' evil troupe-but he found himself clinging desperately to this woman's arm.

  She added, a little more loudly, "He's such a great wizard, he can keep all those nasties at bay, sweeting. They won't be coming near to the camp, just you see. Now come." She drew him toward the fire, opposite where Bektis had resumed his seat.

  "Have yourself a bite to eat, and roll up and sleep. It's been a rough day on you, so it has." She meant to be kind, so Tir didn't say anything and tried to eat a little of the meat and potatoes she offered him. But his stomach hurt so much with fear he could barely choke down a mouthful, and he shook his head at the rest.

  When he lay down in her blankets next to her, with the swarthy guards keeping watch, he could still hear the hrush of huge bodies slipping through the grass, the thick heavy pant of breath. Could smell, mingled with the earth smell and rain smell and new spring grasses, the rank carnivore stink.

  All these interlaced with the clucking of the stream in the gully and lent a horror to dreams in which Rudy's death-over and over, struck by lightning, endlessly falling from the jutting rocks into blackness-alternated with the slow flood of still darker blackness spreading to cover the wizards' flares, to cover them all.

  Then he'd wake, panting with terror, to hear only far-off thunder and the endless hissing of the prairie winds.

  Chapter 5

  On the third day out from Sarda Pass, Bektis and his party were attacked by a scouting band from the Empty Lakes People.

  This didn't surprise the Icefalcon. He had never rated the intelligence of the Empty Lakes People much higher than that of the average prairie dog.

  He had overtaken Bektis around noon of the second day, though the wizard was not aware of the fact. Sometimes the Icefalcon trailed them north of the road, sometimes south, taking advantage of the gullies that scored this land and the low clumps of rabbitbrush and juniper that lifted above the waving green lake of grass.

  The three black warriors, he saw, carried heavy packs-blankets and provisions for many days-bad news given his
own need to hunt as he went. When they halted for nooning, he briefly considered helping himself to their stores but gave up the idea at once.

  Like most of the warriors of the Real World, he carried talismans to give him at least some protection against the illusions-and the scrying abilities-of Wise Ones, but such amulets were only as good as the shaman who wrought them, and he suspected Bektis would be able to see through such wards without much trouble if he had any suspicion that there was a reason to look.

  Even could he slip past whatever guardian-wards Bektis might put around the camp, the mere fact of the thefts would alert them that they were being watched, and with a Wise One in the party this was far too dangerous to permit.

  He was eking out his small supplies of meat and fish with the roots of last autumn's water plantains and cattails, but even they took time to gather and prepare, and he could feel hunger gaining on him.

  Toward sunset of the second day they left the road and turned north to Bison Hill, a mound in the midst of the prairie covered with elder and cottonwood and used by travelers as a campsite-and by bandits as a handy place to find travelers-since time immemorial.

  Deer grazed in the woods, as did the small swift antelope of the plains. He worked his way up to the knoll through stream cuts and bison wallows and under cover of the long prairie grass, making a mental note to speak to Janus about changing the clothing of the Guards from their traditional black to the colors of the earth.

  From a thicket of wild grapes some distance back he watched Hethya and one of the three black warriors-clones, Gil had called them, meaning identical people who were presumably common to her world-unload the donkeys while Bektis built a fire at the edge of the shelter of the trees.