Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  Given Cold Death's strength as a shaman the icefalcon did not doubt that he would be safe from elementals. Still, the damp place, closed in, green-dim, smelling of earth and foxes, made him uneasy.

  The Icefalcon had never shadow-walked. It was not considered safe for boys to make the venture before they reached full manhood, and he had left the Talking Stars People in his seventeenth year. He had seen it done only twice before in his life, when the Talking Stars People had been at war with Black Pig's family of the Salt People.

  On the first occasion, the shadow scout had returned safely, with information about the layout of Black Pig's summer hold in the Cruel River Country that could not be ascertained by ordinary observation.

  The second time, six or seven years later during another war, the scout's friends-it was the same man who had gone before, who had experience-and Cold Death had waited by the body through three nights and two days, Cold Death weaving such spells as would draw back the scout's spirit to the empty and silent flesh.

  After that the tribe had had to move on for fear of being raided by Black Pig. The next time the Talking Stars People had camped in that place Cold Death and the Icefalcon-who was sixteen then-and three or four of the scout's friends returned to the place where the body had lain and seen a few of the man's bones. What became of his spirit they never knew.

  Thus it was with a certain degree of trepidation that the Icefalcon lay himself down between the four cold balls of spirit-fire that Cold Death summoned from the air and watched her drawing out Circles around him.

  There was a Circle of Protection, to keep at bay the elementals and the demons that would have taken over his still living body once his spirit was no longer in residence.

  "You have to watch out for them while you're walking," Cold Death said, once she had completed the marks and stood wiping ocher and blood from her fingertips. "They'll try to distract you, to get you lost once you're out there. They feed on fear and pain."

  There was a Circle of Ancestors. "Do our Ancestors actually guard us when they are summoned to a Circle?" He was drowsy now with the growing effect of the spell and with the warmth of the heat spells she'd called to keep his body from dying in its sleep. He and Cold Death had watched by turns through the previous night, and neither had slept after midnight.

  "I've never seen them." She leaned over him to paint the first lines of the Circle of Power across his face, his hands, his breast under the wolf-hide tunic, in a paste of mud and powdered wildcat blood.

  She wove his name into them, and the image of the pilgrim-bird that dwells in the high cliffs near the glaciers, overlaid with sigils of protection.

  These signs were repeated, over and over, in the lines that spiraled out from him to form the anchoring power-curves of the Circle, running up the wall and, it seemed to him in his half-dreaming state, away into the earth around him, like shining roots.

  The sharp air from the cave's low opening filled the tiny space with fog, through which the wan blue spirit-fires glowed like tiny suns on a day drowned in mist. Sleepiness closed over his mind.

  "You'll want to stop and look at everything." Her fingertip was cold over his hands. "Don't. You're vulnerable to everything-demons, elementals, rain, wind. The sight of the sun itself. If you get lost, you'll never find your way back. Look for the ground first. Don't forget to watch your back trail."

  Back trail, he thought dreamily. Like tracking in strange country. He tried to remember what that long-ago scout had told him.

  "No one is ever really prepared for what it's like." She stuck blades of grass and twigs of the elder tree-whose ancestor was one of the Fifteen Dream Things-into the crossings of the lines. "Not the first time, not the tenth time, not the twentieth. You will be terrified. You have to remember what your flesh was like, every moment, and there will be many things to make you forget. You cannot become unconscious, and you cannot sleep. Do you understand?"

  He murmured, "I understand."

  "Take three deep breaths, then," she said, sounding very far away. "And on the third your spirit will go out of your body. Remember that I'm here waiting."

  One. Two.

  He was alone, hanging in the brilliant air. Sunlight pierced him like lances, needles of pain. He was colder than he could ever remember being, empty, and terrified.

  He couldn't breathe. (Of course, you fool, you have no lungs) But having no lungs did not mean that he did not feel as if he were trapped underwater in that final second before the lungs give out and inhale death. Only that second went on and on.

  It was like being naked in bitter winter.

  It was like the first moment after one has been thrust from the only home one has ever known, the curses of those inside ended only by the silence of the closing door.

  It was like falling, only he did not seem to be getting any closer to the ground.

  Look for the ground first. But the first thing he saw was the sun. It stood just above the eastern horizon still, but filled the dry air with powdered gold. He found he could look at it without injury to his eyes (You have no eyes), and the novelty of that sensation kept him looking, drinking in its light, shaken to his heart by the dense glory of its fire.

  He watched it rise. Grandly, slowly, calmly ...

  No wonder they didn't let young adolescents do this.

  He was the Icefalcon, he thought. He was the Icefalcon. He had to rescue Tir.

  He had to meet Blue Child in battle, when all was done. He had to return to his people.

  Look for the ground.

  He looked down and was swept by wonder and delight. The world was a jewel of topaz, sepia, and a thousand breath-fine gradations of burning green. Threadlike silver lace marked the bottom of the little water cut, the greater water into which it flowed a jumble of diamond-sewn brown silk down the coulee's heart.

  Every leaf and twig of the chokecherry bush over the cave-mouth blazed clear and individual, as if incised, and the tiniest, most fragile wisps of the mists from the heat-spell were each an infinite enchantment to be studied, reveled in, adored.

  The grasslands were a wonderment beyond wonderment, shape and texture and scent that made him want to rub his face against them as against velvet, the bison shaggy houses with frost in their curly fur. Far off, minute and perfect, lay the exquisite ring of a prairie-dog town.

  The twelve blue wagon-tops made a circle in the emerald grass, the horses, streaming out from the opening, a school of brown and black and golden fish. Foreshortened warriors in bronze or sable leather milled about the pale daytime cook fire.

  The black tent was a square of horror against the wagon's square of midnight blue.

  Ah.

  Then like silver fire a demon struck him, an eel blazing out of invisibility to rip his flesh from his bones. The Icefalcon cried out, thorned ropes of pain tearing through his heart.

  A human's bones protected a spirit. Flesh and muscle were armor, and he had none now. The demon pierced him as the sunlight had done, the pain coring him, dizzy, smothering ...

  They feed on fear and pain.

  He could feel them eat. Smoky shapes, toothed fantastic horrors encircling him, he was falling, plunging, dying ...

  What happens when I hit the ground? I have no bones. Cold-headed reasonableness came back. I have no flesh. The pain is an illusion.

  It was a lifelike one.

  Damn the lot of you. Starve and die. It was hard to say it, but he was-he reminded himself-the Icefalcon, who would have been warchief of his people, and he made himself say it, and believe.

  He was still falling, but now he stopped himself from doing so, as he sometimes could in dreams, and walked down the air as down a flight of steps. A demon bit his foot, the pain exactly as if he'd trodden a dagger-blade, but his mind remained locked on the shape of his body and bones, waiting for him in the cave.

  Starve and die, he told them again.

  They spit at him and swirled away. He knew they'd be back. The smell of grass and sod met him as he rea
ched the ground, a great intoxicating earthy rush. He saw the ants creeping between the grass blades, sunlight on pebbles like reflective glass.

  He could distinguish the separate perfumes of needlegrass, squirreltail grass, buffalo grass, the scents of each flower one from another-even the differing odors of clay and mold and rock. A madness of beauty as intense as the terror of the pain before.

  A man came up out of a bison wallow (flesh, clothes, sweat, leather), carrying the dead body of one of the Empty Lakes People over his back, and walked ahead of the Icefalcon toward the camp. The Icefalcon followed him, feeling naked, as if every man among those wagons could see him clearly.

  As they approached the circle of wagons the Icefalcon understood why Cold Death had kept her distance from the place and had told Blue Child to do the same. Even as the demon had been visible to him, certain things looked different now, and he was almost certain that it was not a mage that had kept Cold Death from seeing into the camp.

  Some of the demon-scares-not all-blazed with ugly radiance, the air between them latticed with spells of pain. Past them he beheld the black tent and the wagon against which it stood, lambent with an unhealthy glow, a living rot that pulsed like a heart. Cold Death had told him that her spells would guard him against the demon-scares, but the fear of them still grew as he walked up to their line: he would be trapped, shredded, lose himself ...

  But if he was the icefalcon, he could and would endure. Another man walked past him. A golden-skinned Delta Islander, carrying over his shoulder the body of Long-Flying Bird. Not permitting himself to think, the Icefalcon followed him into the camp, pain dicing him, disorienting, breathless ...

  But he was through.

  The camp stank of magic. The very air there was dark, and moved. All about him warriors saddled, harnessed, rolled blankets, unfastened the chains from the wagon-beds.

  Boxed up gourd bowls and trudged up from the coulee with barrels black-wet and slopping over with flashing frigid springwater. Checked their gear and got it and themselves into marching order.

  It was hard not to lose himself in the clamor and noise, hard to remember why he was here and what he needed next to do.

  White Mustaches was explaining something patiently to a paleskinned warrior from the White Coasts: how to harness the mules. The Icefalcon caught words he knew: ". . . same ... both sides . . ." He was demonstrating the strap lengths. "Balance." The pale warrior only stared, puzzled, from him to the half-harnessed mule and passed a hand over his slick pate. White Mustaches demonstrated again: "balance."

  What warrior, after traveling nearly eight hundred miles from the Alketch, would still not know how to harness mules?

  Another man came up carrying bowls-the same man. Not just a pale man of the White Coasts, but identical in face, in body, in the way he walked. A black sergeant in red-laced boots had to tell him where to stow his burden. The Icefalcon looked around. There could not be so many pairs of twins in a single company of warriors. Not just twins: sets of three and four, as alike as millet seeds.

  Clones, Gil had said.

  The Icefalcon looked again. Never more than four to a set, and only one of any set wore boots. The other three had rawhide rags wrapped around their feet, as had the clone warriors he'd followed from the mountains.

  The rawhide strips were all new.

  The men with full heads of hair, and boots, tried not to look at those without them. Sometimes they'd mutter but most often only turned aside.

  Vair na-Chandros passed him, close enough to touch, the reek of blood and attar of roses mingling in his clothes. He was making for the black tent, the Truth-Finder walking quietly at his side. The Icefalcon would sooner have picked up a live coal, but he followed them as they lifted the black curtains and passed within.

  Masses of lamps hung from the roof, like hornet's nests in a building deserted for three generations, but fewer than half still burned. Most of the candles ranged on planks along the walls, or, standing clumped on iron holders, were guttered to yellow phantasms of twisted wax, and the smell of spent oil, smoke, and tallow mingled with the stench of rotted blood. You could have cut the block of air contained within the tent with a wire, like cheese.

  As the Icefalcon had already guessed, the blue cloth of the wagoncover had been tied back so that the wagon itself made a raised annex onto the square chamber of the tent.

  There were demon-scares everywhere, depending from every lamp-cluster and pole-end. Being in the tent was like being devoured by ants. A couple of the clone warriors were taking down lampstands and packing up candles. They'd be breaking the tent soon.

  The tent contained what was almost certainly apparatus that dated from the Times Before.

  Gil will be pleased, thought the Icefalcon.

  It resembled in workmanship the little that the Icefalcon had seen at the Keep, the pieces from which Rudy had constructed flamethrowers to fight the Dark Ones, and some of what had turned out to be lamps in the crypts where the hydroponics tanks were.

  A deep vat, or sarcophagus, occupied most of the wagon-bed. Wooden stairs went up to it, the straw on them, and on the floor of the tent itself, so soaked in blood that it squished under the feet of the men.

  The vat's curved sides were wrought of what looked like the same black stone as the outer walls of the Keep, but within-the Icefalcon climbed cautiously to the wagon-bed to see-it was lined with silvery glass, and like fragments of twig and leaf caught in ice, there seemed to be transparent crystals, shards of iron, and tiny spheres of amber and obsidian embedded in the darkly shimmering inner layer.

  A canopy of three linked half arches surmounted it, intertwined metal and glass-two men were taking them down now. They wore boots and moved with more intelligence and purpose than did the clones, and packed the apparatus carefully into great wooden crates, stuffing in wadding of dry grass, wool, crumpled parchments, and rags of linen and rawhide.

  At their apex the arches had been joined by a many-sided obsidian polyhedron and linked down their sides with dangling nets of what appeared to be meshed gold wire, worn thin and tattered, and woven with more spheres of glass and amber.

  Two more polyhedrons, glass or crystal, tentacled in gold tubes and set on wooden plinths-the plinths were raw-new-stood at the opposite end of the tub. One of the booted warriors boxed them up as the Icefalcon watched.

  To the Icefalcon's spirit sight, the whole of the apparatus shimmered with magic, and he understood why Cold Death spoke of it with uneasiness and fear.

  There were petcocks and drains on the vat, and the straw underneath them, sodden and stinking, was being cleared away. Sockets, too, made dark little mouths in the corners of the vat to accommodate what looked like poles with ingeniously geared crank-wheels, but these had already been dismantled. Where had they had gotten all of this? the Icefalcon wondered. And how had it survived the centuries-decades of centuries, Gil said-since the Times Before?

  Hidden away, as Gil and Maia had said?

  It looked built to last, like all the possessions of the mud-diggers, who could not abide the thought of anything they owned passing into dust.

  In the lower part of the tent, on the straw and rough carpets of the floor, the Truth-Finder was packing up a little box. Coming near, the Icefalcon saw that it contained needles made of crystal, dozens of them, each with a bead on its head: amber, iron, crystal, black stone.

  White Mustaches, whom Vair greeted as Nargois, came into the tent and asked a question in which the Icefalcon recognized the words for corpses-only Vair used the word carcasses, the bodies of animals and barbarians. Nargois assented, and Vair seemed pleased.

  Nargois asked something about the Keep of Dare, and Vair shrugged as he replied. Though he knew of it-how not?-the siege was clearly not a matter that deeply concerned him.

  Eleven hundred men? Why not?

  Blood-stench, magic, cold, and pain twisting at his mind, the Icefalcon left the tent. He saw no reason why he could not go directly through the walls, and he
was right: the scrape and itch of every layer of the cheap black cloth and canvas, darkness, then the bright dry sunlight of the plains morning.

  He investigated the other wagons as the men loaded them. Most contained food; one held weapons. Two were packed with clothing, heavy furs and densely quilted jackets in addition to the loose, bright-hued hand-me-down trousers and tunics worn by most of the men.

  In another wagon he found crates of the type he had seen in the tent: heavy wood, draped with demon-scares, and dimly glowing with the sickish pale light that played around the apparatus in the tent. Some other apparatus, clearly.

  May their Ancestors protect the folk of the Keep if it prove as evil.

  But, of course, he thought, the Ancestors of the Keep folk could not protect them. The protection lay only in Tir's memories-and it was the Icefalcon's failure that had separated Tir from them.

  Outside, men were taking down the demon-scares from their poles, the last thing done before moving on. One or two pocketed them if they thought they were unobserved. It was an easy matter for the Icefalcon to leave the camp.

  So Vair had machinery from the Times Before.

  And a woman who claimed to be possessed of a spirit from those times, though Gil, who was wise in many matters, considered her a fraud.

  From a rise in the windswept lands, the Icefalcon watched the caravan draw away. The snapping of whips, harness leather creaking, and the ceaseless bleat of sheep pierced him, musical as the light and the smells and the terror of the demons who now, he saw, materialized from the air and drifted after the wagons like thinly glowing sharks. The cold had grown on him, crippling and exhausting, drawing him toward the unfulfilled promise of the sun's ascending disk.

  Slowly he let himself drift upward, until he hung like his namesake hawk far above the smooth curves of the land. His sight could follow the trace of the trail, a grass-filled groove paler than the surrounding hills, all the way to the dark tuft of Bison Hill in the distance.

  In the other direction that pale groove drove south, arrow-straight, the scuffed smudges like footprints marking Vair's previous camps. Every draw and wash and coulee formed serpentine patterns of red and sepia, silver agonizingly bright through the dust-green cottonwood and sedge.