Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  This was a shock to Tir, another cold drench of panic. "It is well done."

  Lord Vair gestured impatiently. "Were you followed?"

  "Only as far as the crest of the pass, my Lord. The wizard Ingold not being at the Keep, they sent another of the Keep mages after me. I slew him with the lightning of my hands and buried the pass under a blizzard of snow." The final sunlight leaped and sparkled from his flourishing hand.

  "Daily since then have I scried the pass. The spells I laid on it still hold strong."

  "And Ingold?" His words came out like slaps in the face. His speech, though recognizably the words of the Wathe, had a different intonation, the sounds bent and changed and the accents differently placed.

  "He is in Gae still."

  Tir's heart sank, but he bit back tears. Those cold wolf eyes cut over toward him, measuring him as they measured all things and, as they found all things, finding him wanting.

  "Demon-fornicating son of Evil. And the wench?"

  "I am here, Vair na-Chandros of the Southern Realms." Hethya stepped forward, drawing herself tall. "Anios ithbach amrdmmas a teyelsan, 'The ignorant speak easily of that which they do not under stand.' "

  The sonorous words flowed from her tongue like the magic speech of wizards, and her face seemed to grow longer and thinner, a different set to the mouth than Hethya's broad grin, the hazel eyes unsparkling, cold as a priestess'. "The girl Hethya, Uranwe's Daughter, is here with me also, but I am here, I, Oale Niu; here in this place where I stood three thousand years ago, and I will not be slighted."

  The men who had come up behind Lord Vair murmured among themselves, and one or two bowed their heads.

  After a moment Lord Vair inclined his, just slightly, as well. "I meant no disrespect, Lady," he said. "And indeed I apologize for the clumsiness of my tongue. The apparatus you instructed us in worked well, as you see."

  He signed toward the men gathered around the wagons at the foot of the slope. It was a little difficult for Tir at first because all were strangers to him, bald and without facial hair of any kind, and he was not used to the sight of so many black faces, but he realized that many of them had the same features, like the Akulae.

  A word came to his mind unbidden, from the dark hollow of memory: tethyn. They were called tethyn. And there was something awful about them-or about it-something that made him feel sick inside, something he didn't want to know.

  "I trust that the other apparatus will function as well."

  "How many things function as once they did, with the passage of years?" She looked him coldly up and down and spoke in the voice of Oale Niu, strange coming from Hethya's lush mouth. "Not men, certainly, nor the bodies of men. But the machines we built in the ancient days are wrought of power and adamant," she went on, as if she did not see Lord Vair's face cloud with anger. "They will do as they were made to do, my Lord. Be sure of it."

  On these words she turned her back on him and strode serenely off into the woods, swallowed up by the shadows of the trees, leaving Tir alone.

  Vair flicked his left hand-Tir noticed already that he kept his hooks low at his side or hidden within his sleeve or the folds of his white woolen cloak. "Set the camp. Nargois, Bektis . . ."

  The sorcerer stepped closer, as did another man, tall like Lord Vair, extravagantly mustachioed and cloaked like him in white, his clothing adorned with ribbons and jewels of rank. "Let's see the brat."

  Tir wanted to shrink back and conceal himself behind the tree but knew it wouldn't do any good. Besides, it wasn't brave. When Vair, Nargois, and Bektis were halfway across the clearing to him he was swept by a wave of dread that this awful lord would know all about Akula's knife hidden in his boot.

  He looked away, trying to breathe, and the next moment Lord Vair's iron fingers in their white leather glove had his chin in a grip like a machine, forcing his head up.

  For a moment Tir looked into those honey eyes and saw in them worse things than he'd ever known in his life.

  Then, very deliberately, Vair released his chin and struck him across the face, hard enough to knock him down. Tir fell, crying out with shock and pain, and the silver hooks flickered out of their concealment, catching Tir's sleeve and ripping the flesh of his shoulder underneath as they pulled him to his feet again.

  Vair slapped him twice more, Tir sobbing but too terrified to cry. The hooks pulled him to his feet again and then jerked free of his sleeve, Vair's left hand grabbing his collar while the hooks on their ivory stump whipped around and slashed across his face, opening the flesh from temple to cheekbone in a single vicious swipe.

  Tir screamed in pain, and Vair shook him, his head jerking back and forth, his breath strangled in the twist of his collar and his neck half broken by the man's strength. Then Vair caught the hooks in his face again, less than a finger-breadth from the corner of his eye.

  "Listen to me, little boy," said that cold grating voice, and Tir, weeping in terror and feeling as if he were going to faint or wet himself, stared up into those vulpine eyes. "Do you know how easy it would be for me to pull half the flesh off your face? So that it flaps back and forth like a pancake?"

  He shook him, only a gentle wobble this time, but horrible as a blow. "Or to dig out one of your eyes? You'll only need one for the job you're going to do for me. Nod your head."

  Blank with fear, Tir nodded, and felt the metal pull in his flesh. With a movement of his wrist Vair freed the hooks and shoved Tir facedown on the grass.

  With his hands still tied behind him, he couldn't break his fall. His face felt as if it had puffed up to the size of his head, the air like cold metal against the pouring heat of his blood. He lay crying, not daring to look up or move or breathe. Something shoved at his chin, hard.

  Above him the cold voice said, "Now kiss my boot, and tell me that you love me."

  Tir had to wriggle forward on his shoulders, sobbing so hard he could barely speak. "I love you," he made himself say and kissed the leather. It was cold and smooth and smelled of wax and old blood.

  Vair kicked him. "Say it so I can hear you."

  "I love you." He had to do it right. He had to do it right or this man would kill him.

  "Again. Bektis and Nargois want to hear, too."

  "I love you!" screamed Tir, and bunched himself together, knees to his tucked-down chin, sobbing.

  Vair kicked him again and walked away; Tir could hear the scrunch of his boots on the trampled grass. "Fix that cut," he heard him say. "Then see me in the wagon."

  Bektis came over, pushed him upright against the sycamore trunk, and very quickly smeared salve on Tir's face, as if the injury were somehow Tir's fault.

  He pushed the edges of the two lines of cut flesh together and wrapped a bandage around Tir's head, but he worked very fast: "Stop crying," he ordered, "lest my Lord return and make you cry in good earnest."

  He hastened away to the wagon. Later, when he thought about it, Tir realized Bektis must be almost as afraid of Lord Vair as he was. Now he only put the uninjured side of his face against the tree trunk and cried.

  Boots crunched the grass again and Tir whirled in nauseated terror. It was Hethya, dropping to her knees beside him and gathering him in her arms. There was another man behind her, one of the black warriors, a young man as big as a tree.

  "He all right, Lady?" He held out a gourd of water.

  "I think so. Thank you, laddy-buck." She took the water, held Tir close against her. He buried his head against her breasts, wanting to hide himself in her body, wanting to be a baby again and be taken care of, wanting to be dead. He heard the water from the gourd drip on the grass and wondered if they'd beat him if he didn't drink it or say thank you.

  "I got these." The young man's voice had the same inflection as Akula's, awkward over the tongue of the Wathe. "Dates, understand? Dates?"

  He felt Hethya move, reaching, and heard the warm smile in her voice. "Thank you."

  "My own father, he beat me. Bad. But not like that." There was a clumsy pau
se, and Tir felt the man's rough fingers touch him very gently on the hair. Then the grass crunched again as the young soldier walked away.

  Tir curled himself into a ball, trying to make himself as small and impervious as an apple seed, and cried until he fell asleep.

  Chapter 10

  They harnessed the wagons with the first of morning light and traveled north.

  The Icefalcon, who had seen the furs and quilting, the snowshoes and ice axes packed among the stores, was not surprised. "They journey to where the land is cold, o my enemy," he said, from the bison wallow south of the road where he and Cold Death had joined Loses His Way shortly before sunset.

  "With your permission, when they have passed from sight we will visit your kin again in the coulee and see what other clothing they can lend."

  But as the wagons drew close to the coulee Lord Vair raised his arm and called a halt, and the Icefalcon saw men descend into the bottomlands and presently return dragging and carrying the swollen, crow-gouged bodies of the slain.

  "What hunting is this?" rumbled Loses His Way, and Yellow Eyed Dog, lying beside him with his nose between his paws, pricked his ears at the anger in the man's voice.

  "Cold hunting for us." Icefalcon propped his chin on his crossed wrists. He had shaved that morning, but after six nights sleeping on the ground could have done with a long soak in the baths on first level south, or a session in one of the sweathouses at the winter steadings of his people. "I for one am not eager to try to slip into their camp, within my body or out of it, to borrow furs."

  The chieftain shook his head. "No need. When we prepared to attack we left our blankets and heavy clothing and our spare food in a fox burrow in the bank, a mile up the gulch," he said. "They will be there still. But this ... Can they not let even the dead sleep in peace?"

  "The dead are not disturbed when the kites strip their bones," remarked Cold Death, and tweaked the fur between Yellow-Eyed Dog's paw-pads just to see him turn his head and look at her patiently. "Your family sleeps still."

  "Pah!"

  "They took the bodies of the slain yestermorning as well," the Icefalcon said thoughtfully. "They're in that wagon there, the last in line ... Look." Bektis, resplendent now in a coat of quilted velvet with an immense collar of ermine and gloves of white kid on his hands, stepped down from the wagon he rode in and came around to the last wagon in the line, which even in the spring chill could be smelled from the bison wallow.

  "Does he make magic with the bones of the dead?"

  "Puts a spell on them to arrest rot, more like."

  "He should put one on his own heart, then." The warchief's tawny brows pulled down till the weather-reddened face seemed little more than the arched crag of a nose projecting from a great fiery tangle of braided gold and a glint of angry blue. "And on the heart of that black saber-tooth that would hurt a little child."

  Bektis lifted his gloved hands, making graceful passes over the wagonload of carrion, long white hair streaming in the freshening wind.

  It would be a mass of snarls by nightfall, thought the Icefalcon braiding was the only way to deal with the plains wind. Then the sorcerer climbed back aboard his own wagon, wrapped himself carefully in blankets, and pulled up his hood. Nargois of the long white mustaches wheeled his horse and raised his hand; there was a great cracking of whips along the line, and the caravan moved off.

  Since there was no possible way they could lose the train in the empty universe of prairies, the Icefalcon, Loses His Way, and Cold Death, after retrieving the coats and blankets, the pemmican and short, heavy war axes from the fox burrow and loading them onto their horses, investigated the camp as well.

  "These clones, as you call them, fell and died yesterday," said Loses His Way, poking in the midden of scraps and ashes. "They slumped down where they stood, like men taken suddenly by sickness. But neither the woman nor the Wise One made a move to cleanse themselves, nor to shift their camp. I smelled no smokes of healing."

  "And they carried the bodies away with them." The Icefalcon studied the ground where one of the clones had lain, close by the trampled ground and dung of the horse lines.

  The yellow leaf-mast was stained with the liquid of unnatural decay, and the marks of heavy hoots and men's feet in rawhide strips showed where the corpses had been lifted and carried to the wagon in the night. "The apparatus Vair carries with him makes warriors, not out of air, I think, but out of the flesh of the dead."

  "It is an evil hunt." Loses His Way stroked the end of his enormous mustache. "And now you tell me that my people have scattered to the far corners of the wind, not knowing what is being done with their flesh and their bones."

  He touched the place on his breast where, under his deer-hide shirt, lay the flat embroidered spirit-pouches of Blue Jay, Wolfbone, Twin Daughter, Shouts In Anger, and Raspberry Thicket Girl. "It is one matter, o my enemy," he said, looking down at Cold Death, who barely came up to his breastbone, "to feed the vultures with your flesh. The vultures are our sisters, too, and so all things return to the home of our Ancestors. But this shamanry, this evil..." He shook his head.

  "This I will not forgive."

  Cold Death called the names of the horses into the wind, and the horses came, trotting up from the long grass of the coulee, snuffling and ears pricked. Ashes, Scorpion Eater, and Afraid of Flowers had been joined by two others, southern horses who had escaped during the raid, and they, too, were laden with blankets, furs, and supplies.

  So they mounted and rode north, into the rocks and gorges and lava beds called the Cursed Lands. The caravan moved, and the Icefalcon followed, and the stink of the corpses could be smelled in its wake until Bektis repeated his spells while wearing the crystal hand.

  The moon waxed to full and began to wane again, and somewhere behind them, the Icefalcon was aware, drifted the Talking Stars People, like vultures riding the thermals and waiting for a sick animal to fall.

  No road existed in the Cursed Lands, yet the wagons made their way north and slightly west unerringly, without halts and queries and casting about. The Icefalcon remembered the pale trace in the gamma grass, invisible from the ground but straight as a bowstring.

  At night, or with the first dove-colored light, the frost a silver dust in the grass, the Icefalcon would see Vair na-Chandros and the woman Hethya come out from among the wagons with Tir between them, Tir thinner and more haggard by the day.

  The Icefalcon never came close enough to hear-with Bektis in the train he did not dare-but it seemed to him that it was Tir who pointed to the gaps in the hills and gave directions by the dim-shining stars.

  The land grew harsher. Gullies and washes creased the bare clay hills, steeper than before, dividing the scattered prairies where slunch glowed filthily in the dark. Twice the Icefalcon shadow-walked, investigating the edges of the camp and seeking a way to extricate Tir from Vair's grip.

  But Tir was kept bound much of the time, and there were many guards, facing all ways, inward and out. Cold Death was as fearsome a warrior as she was a shaman-something no one ever thought, to look at her-but with Bektis' crystal hand, even her aid might not suffice to get the boy away safely.

  Vair would kill Tir rather than permit his escape. And, for all her frivolousness, the Icefalcon was fond of his sister and would not like to see the lightning of that cursed crystal hand skewer her as it had skewered Rudy. There would and could be only a single attempt, and it had better succeed.

  Whatever it was that Vair wanted, it lay in the North.

  His mind returned to the trace he had seen from the air. The work of the Times Before, built in the ancient days beyond the memories of the People of the Real World. He asked Cold Death about it, but Cold Death, who knew the properties of every herb and root in the great grasslands of the Real World, and the names of the ki of each tree and stream, could only say, "I have never heard of such a thing, o my brother."

  And Loses His Way, who could (and nightly did) detail the family histories of every horse belonging
to his own people and any number of other clans and tribes from whom the Empty Lakes People raided horses-who could recognize the prints and scat of king mammoths and individual musk oxen and reindeer in half a dozen herds and tell stories about them-only shook his head and said, "That's foolish. Nothing lies in the North but the Ice. Why would anyone build a road thence?"

  "That's what I'm trying to figure out," the Icefalcon snapped, exasperated, though he knew he would have received a similar reply from Noon or any of his friends in his family-Red Fox or Stays Up All Night or Fifty Lovers.

  And though Loses His Way could, like any of the people in the Real World, speak of the habits of animals long dead, or the small details of war parties and hunts for generations back, or recount from memory weather conditions mentioned to him in passing forty leagues to the south, he had very little interest in the slunch-born things that roved the hills abandoned by gazelles and rhinoceri, the lumpy misshapen beings that Gil said were broken echoes of life as it had been years uncounted in the past.

  Why? the Icefalcon wondered. Lost dreams, Gil called them, woven in the slunch and repeated without meaning-but whose dreams? And what had the world been like that had spawned them?

  He had been affected, he thought, a little embarrassed, more than he knew, by the habits of civilized folk and did not like to speak of this to his sister or to Loses His Way. And indeed, it was not the way of the Talking Stars People to show interest in such matters, which had no bearing on life as it was lived in the Real World.

  Still, the road was there. And as the cold grew more piercing, and the great sheets of slunch that even the wind could not rustle lay more and more frequent and their voiceless denizens took the place of the creatures that had once grazed these dying prairies, the Icefalcon welcomed the far-off plaints of the Alketch sheep and the squeak of wagon axles, the only living sounds to break the stillness of these lands.

  It was high spring, and they rode through a world filled with light. But the temperature fell, and the thunderstorms that at one time had crashed and raged daily over these lands were mute and absent as the vanished birds. There was only the wind itself, bearing the smell of stone and sleet.