Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  Ilae looked up from grinding dried purple-bead roots in the mortar. "Does such a thing exist?"

  "Who knows?" Gil replied. "We don't know what's been stashed away all these years, left over from the Times Before. Ingold is always finding references to stuff the Church confiscated and hid and never talked about."

  "And with good reason, if legend is anything to go by." Maia stood in the doorway, his long face lined with concern. "How is he?"

  "About the same." Gil shrugged, hiding fear and anxiety, as the Icefalcon did. "Maybe other people hid stuff, too, out of fear of the Church or of their neighbors. Now those places have been broken open, and nobody's keeping an eye on them anymore." She glanced sidelong at Maia.

  "Why do you think Ingold's been in such a panic to find books and implements and whatever other apparatus he can?"

  "There were certainly records in my episcopal palace of things I did not understand, hidden in places lost to anyone's memory," the tall Bishop agreed. "We do not even know what may still be hidden in this Keep, untouched since the Dark's first rising."

  "And it's a good guess Govannin had a couple of secrets on hand. For all she carried on about mages being soulless tools of Evil, she was quick enough to use black magic in anything she considered a good cause. If Bektis ever did manage to break her hold on him, you can bet your best fur booties he'd help himself to whatever he could stick in his pockets."

  "How soon will the storm clear?" Alde, who had sat all this while with bowed head in silence, now looked up at Wend. "How soon can a party go over the pass in pursuit?"

  "I'll go out there in the morning," the physician promised. "Even the strongest spells disperse, if their maker is not there renewing them. I'm not the weather-witch Bektis is, but I should be able to hasten their breaking."

  "How soon?" Her eyes were like the heart of the night, her voice porcelain, cold and friable, as if it would shatter at a touch.

  "Tomorrow afternoon?"

  She whispered again, "Thank you." Her small hands closed around Rudy's brown, cold fingers, seeking reassurance, perhaps hoping to hold his spirit to his flesh. She hadn't touched the tisane Linnet had brought, or the supper, either. Gil knew better than to think that she would unless forced.

  I'd better get some sleep, thought Gil. And pack.

  She remembered the three identical warriors. Were others waiting to join Bektis once he got over the pass? A dozen or a hundred, cookie-cuttered out of some unguessable spell? Ingold had never mentioned such a thing to her, nor Bektis' jeweled weapon, either.

  How could she, and the Guards, and a novice like Wend cope with those and whatever else the sorcerer had up his fur-lined sleeves? But the concern turned out to be moot. An hour or so later Ilae put down her herbs and sat up straight, her hand going to her temple, her eyes suddenly flaring wide. "Damn," she said.

  Alde, her hand still locked around Rudy's where she sat on the floor, a pillow at her back, looked up sharply at the note in the girl's voice. "What is it?"

  "I . . ." Ilae hesitated, frowning, listening hard to sounds only she could hear. Then the witchlight brightened behind her head as she dug in the purse at her belt for a scrying stone, a ruby Ingold had found in the ruins of Penambra, which she turned and maneuvered in the sharp glint of the light.

  "Damn," she said again, more forcefully, and pushed her rusty hair out of her eyes. "There're men coming up the road from the river valley, my Lady. Lots of men-horses-spears glittering in the moonlight..."

  "What?" Alde surged lithely to her feet, crossed the room in a flurry of petticoats, and looked over Ilae's shoulder as if she too could see in the jewel. "Where?"

  "They've just passed the wards we set up in the Arrow Gorge. Hundreds, it looks like. Carts and tents." She looked up into the Lady's face with baffled eyes. "It's hard to see in darkness, but I think they're black-faced, black-skinned, the men of the Alketch, and the brown men of the Delta islands with gold beads in their hair. They're coming fast."

  Alde cursed, something she seldom did. "Send for Janus," she said. "We need to meet them at the Tall Gates and hold them there, if we can. Thank you, Ilae..."

  Gil was already out of the room, striding down the Royal Way toward the Aisle and the lamplit watchroom of the Guards.

  The Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched Bektis' camp through the night, turn and turn about with hunting small game in the coulee. They worked mostly in businesslike silence, though Loses His Way asked about the conditions of grass on the eastern side of the mountains, and the movements of mammoth and bison herds, always a fruitful topic among the peoples of the Real World.

  He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most mud-diggers.

  "It is very foolish not to know whether your horses are the sons and daughters of brave beasts or cowards," he said gravely, stripping the skin from a woodchuck he had shot while Yellow-Eyed Dog slaveringly feigned disinterest.

  They sheltered in another bison wallow, not the one southeast of the hill but an older one to the southwest, full of curly buffalo grass and pennyroyal, with a good view over the broken lands to the south.

  "How can you know what they will do if you don't know about their ancestors before them? These mud-diggers of yours want all the wrong things and don't know what is important."

  "They are not my mud-diggers," pointed out the Icefalcon. "And I have told them this many times."

  "Then why do you follow this shaman? This child is not your kin. He may even be your enemy." He used the word dingyeh, "notkin," oktep in the tongue of the Talking Stars, and set the strips of woodchuck flesh over the hot coals of last night's fire to roast.

  "The child is ..." The Icefalcon was silent a moment, trying to phrase his relationship to Eldor-and to the people in the Keep-in terms that could be understood in the Real World. There was much about his new life that he could not explain in terms of the old.

  At length he said, "The child's father helped me and gave me shelter when I departed from my own people."

  "Did you need shelter?" asked Loses His Way.

  "No. But for his sake I would not like to see the boy come to harm. What troubles me now, is that Bektis must be watching his back trail . . ."

  And then they were no longer two, but three. The Icefalcon couldn't even tell how long she'd been there.

  She was a diminutive woman, with the black hair that sometimes marked Wise Ones in the Real World. From babyhood her parents had shaved it off, so she had never learned to regard it. It was hacked off short now, straight as water and heavy as the hand of fate. When the Icefalcon had seen her last, it had not yet been touched by gray. Her eyes were black, too.

  "Little brother," she said.

  "Elder sister." He inclined his head. "You know Loses His Way, our enemy from the Empty Lakes People."

  She nodded. Everyone in the Real World knew everyone else, pretty much, or at least knew of them.

  "It pleases me to see that you were not devoured by the Eaters in the Night, o my sister. I had heard that they singled out the Wise."

  She smiled, small but very bright, like a star. "Then I suppose I am not all that Wise."

  She picked a pink-edged flower of bindweed and turned it in her fingers, smiling at the silkiness of the petals under her touch. "Do they still haunt the lands west of the wall of snows, little brother?"

  He shook his head. "At the end of that first winter a Wise One there sent them away to the other side of Night, where no people live and it is night forever. They have not returned again."

  "Good," said Cold Death briskly and worked the flower into the end of the Icefalcon's braid among the bones.

  "I thought it must have been something of the kind. Now who is this Bektis, and why does it concern you that he watches his back trail?" She sat down cro
sslegged between them and picked the woodchuck's heart out of the coals, devouring it with an expression of ecstasy. "Was it he who slew five of the Empty Lakes People and put their bodies in the coulee, or was that you, little brother?"

  "It was Bektis," the Icefalcon said a little grumpily because he loved woodchuck hearts with a great, strong love. "And those with him."

  He gave her a quick summary of the events of the past four days, finishing with, "He is a fool, but not so much a fool that he would not watch his back trail, knowing that he was observed in carrying the boy away. He knows that the warriors of the Keep will bear stronger amulets against his spells of battle illusion and battle panic than the warriors of the Empty Lakes People, whose shaman Walking Eyes was killed by the Eaters seven years ago, yet he displays no concern over the matter. He waits here for something."

  Cold Death tousled the dog's ruff. "For the rest of the black warriors," she said. The dog sniffed at her and licked her hand.

  "T'cha!" scolded Loses His Way amiably. "You kiss your people's enemies, o my brother?"

  "He tastes her that he may devour her later," explained the Icefalcon, and the warchief nodded.

  "Very well, then."

  "Ninety-eight of them are a day south of here," Cold Death went on. "Tonight you'll be able to see their fires. As for why he shows no concern about pursuit... "

  She frowned. She had sharp little flecks of brow, pulling together over a short snub nose.

  "There is power in that band," she said. "They have twelve wagons covered in blue canvas, and surrounding them ... not darkness, but a movement that bends the shape of the air."

  She shook her head and tried to shape some kind of meaning with her square brown short-fingered hand. "There is evil in them, such as I have never before seen. Demons follow them, and the elementals of water and air and earth. Blue Child follows these warriors and their wagons at a distance."

  "And does the Blue Child," asked the Icefalcon softly, "ride these lands?"

  "These lands are ours," said Cold Death. "Unto the Night River Country and down to the Bones of God."

  Loses His Way hackled like a wolf at the suggestion that the Iarger portion of the Real World did not in fact belong to the Empty Lakes People, but Cold Death continued unconcernedly, picking another flower. "It was Blue Child who sent me scouting, to see who or what awaited this dark captain, with the hook for his hand, at Bison Hill."

  Bison Hill was the only place the mud-diggers used for meetings, the only landmark large enough to catch their blunted attention. The Icefalcon only asked, "A hook?"

  Vair na-Chandros, he thought. It had to be.

  "A big man with hair that curls like that of a bison's hump, gray with age, not white in youth as many of the black warriors. His eyes are yellow and his voice like dirt in a tin pot. He has a silver hook in place of his right hand, and his men call him Lord. You know this man?"

  "I know him." The Icefalcon's face was impassive as he turned the woodchuck meat on the flat rocks among the coals.

  "In the days of the Dark ones, this hook-handed one commanded the forces of the Alketch that came to help humankind against the Dark. He abandoned them in the burning Nests that he might preserve his own followers when he went to war in the Alketch. After that I am told he tried to make himself Emperor of the South by wedding the old Emperor's daughter against her will. Now he rides north, does he, with less than six score men, and wagons filled with uncanny things?"

  He sat up a little and gazed south across the broken lands, green miles of chilly springtime where a red-tailed hawk circled lazily and a couple of uintatheria, ungainly moving mountains with their tusked and plated heads swinging back and forth, ambled from one gully to another in their eternal quest for fresh leaves.

  But what he saw was the rainbow figure descending the steps of the Keep in the mists and the hatred in those fox-gold eyes when they looked on Ingold Inglorion.

  He saw too the upraised hooks, scarlet with firelight, summoning back his troops out of the darkness of the burning Nests. Saw Ingold-and hundreds of others-engulfed and borne away by the Dark.

  It came back to him also what Gil-Shalos had told him about the Emperor's daughter of the South.

  "I like this not, o my sister," he said at last. "This Vair is an evil man, and now you tell me he rides with an evil magic in his train. Whether this be a mage or a talisman or an object of power, I would feel better if I knew something more of his intent, before he takes the boy into his grasp. Will you remain here, my enemy, and look out for the boy? If they await Vair's coming, having brought Tir this distance, he should be safe enough."

  "I will abide," said the warchief. "He owes me somewhat, this Wise One."

  "Good." The Icefalcon rose. "Then let us ride, o my sister," he said.

  Bright against the green-black trees, a red scarf flashed, slashing to and fro.

  "They're in sight," said Melantrys of the Guards.

  As when wind passes over a standing grove, with a single movement the men and women on the north watchtower bent their bows, hooked the strings into place. Another movement-another wind gust the soft deadly clattering of arrow shafts.

  The same wind moved Gil, automatic now but still rich with heightened sensation in her mind and heart: the spiny rough feathers, the waxy smoothness of horsehair and yew. From the watchtower's foot the narrow road led down to the Arrow River Gorge, champagne-pale between clustering walls of mingled green: fir, hawthorn, hazel, fern.

  Rustling muttered above the breeze shift of the trees. Sharp as the red arbutus in the ditches came the whinny of horses.

  "The fat bleedin' shame of it," sighed Caldern, a northcountry man so big he looked like a thunderstorm in his black Guards tunic and coat. "Whatever you do, lassie, don't kill the horses. We can aye use 'em."

  Rishyu Hetakebnion, Lord Ankres' youngest son, whispered to Gil, "Do you think we'll turn them back?" He'd spent hours dressing and braiding his hair for this occasion. He hadn't liked being put in the north tower company as a common archer, but his father had insisted upon it: If you're going to give commands one day, you must first learn how to obey them.

  Gil shook her head. "Not a hope."

  The leading ranks of the Alketch army came into view.

  It is no easy matter to count troops and estimate materiel through a hunk of ensorcelled ruby an inch and three-quarters long: scrying can tell a wizard where and if, but seldom how many.

  By the time Melantrys and Lank Yar, the Keep's chief hunter, returned from reconnaissance with the news that the Alketch troops numbered nearly eleven hundred strong, the enemy was only hours from the Tall Gates.

  They were armed for siege, too, Melantrys said. Mules and oxen hauled two "turtles," constructions of log and leather designed to protect soldiers while they undermined towers and walls.

  With a full muster of the Keep's available warriors and all ablebodied adults to back them up, Janus estimated they could hold the Tall Gates for a time, but against trained men the cost would probably be terrible.

  "With all due respect to Mistress Hornbeam and Master Barrelstave," he'd whispered to Minalde at the tense convocation that had followed Melantrys' return, "one seasoned warrior properly armed can account for half a dozen volunteers. Leavin' aside that we can't afford to lose a soul here, their line'll cave. And for what?"

  The commander of the Alketch troops was a srocky goldenskinned Delta Islander in an inlaid helmet bristling with spikes. He drew rein just where the road curved on its final approach to the Gates, and Gil could see the choke of men behind him, armored in bronze and steel and black-lacquered cane in the milky light of the overcast morning.

  Looking at the Tall Gates.

  "That's it," murmured Janus, a few feet along the makeshift wood rampart from where Gil stood. He wore full battle gear, something fewer than half the Guards possessed: black enameled breastplate and helm, rerebraces and pauldrons and gloves, unornamented save for the gold eagles of the House of Dare.

&nb
sp; "Think about it real good before you come on, me jolly boy. Surely there's another party you can go to instead?"

  But Gil knew there wasn't. With the slow-growing cold of the Summerless Year, even the settlements along the river valley had waned, dying out or succumbing to bandit troops. She had heard that the situation in the Felwoods was worse.

  The Keep of Dare in its high cold vale was the last organized center of civilization for many, many leagues, the last large, stable source of food production. Elsewhere was only banditry, White Raiders, and spreading chaos.

  There was no other party to go to.

  For the past seven years, the people of the Keep had been working on the watchtowers of the Tall Gates. They'd repaired the old stonework as well as they could without proper quarrying tools and raised palisades of sharpened tree trunks around the platforms on top.

  Bandit troops had burned the towers twice, but even before the disaster of the Summerless Year it had been hard to get draft animals to haul stone up from the river valley.

  Gil would have bet a dozen shirt-laces they would be in flames again within an hour, had she been able to find a taker.

  Between the towers another palisade stretched, a rough chevaux-de-friese of outward-pointing stakes, hastily cut and sharpened, fired hard, braced in the earth, and interwoven with all the brush that could be gathered to make the hedge thicker yet.

  Eleven hundred troops, thought Gil, her gloved fingers icy on the arrow-nock. They weren't going to turn back.

  Battle drums echoed in the high rocks of the pass, ominous, palpable in the marrow of the bones. The golden commander edged his golden horse aside. The ranks parted-ebony soldiers from the Black Coast, ivory from the White, and the red-brown D'haalac borderlanders.

  Variegated banners lifted and curled in the morning wind. For some reason Gil remembered old Dr. Bannister of the UCLA history department, dry and fragile as a cast cicada skin, standing at the lecture-hall podium saying, "Henry II marched his armies against Philip Augustus..."

  Just that. Marched his armies. No wet boots and feet that ached with cold. No rush of adrenaline or hammering heart at the thought: What if I die ... ?