Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  Somewhere a man cried out in fear, and when he passed a wall white with frost the Icefalcon saw clumsy words scrawled in the white crystals, higher than a man could reach. There were no footprints on the frost below.

  Tir was hiding in this haunted place. The Icefalcon quickened his stride for the Aisle.

  There was torchlight there, and hemp-oil lamps. Voices echoed far less than they did in Renweth, for the sharpness of the sound was absorbed by the muck underfoot and the leathery monstrosity growing into darkness. Even the voices of enemies were a comfort after the darkness, the sight of men engaged in mundane tasks like sorting weapons and boots and blankets under the eye of their sergeants.

  As the Icefalcon watched, another clone dropped his load of cornmeal, flung up his arms, and fled away into the chamber's vast darkness, leaping and dancing and shrieking with demon laughter.

  The sergeant in charge turned uncertainly toward a doorway behind whose brittle, decaying louvers the white glow of magefire burned. But in the end he hadn't the courage to enter. From that doorway the Icefalcon heard Vair's harsh snap of orders and the scrape and chink of metal.

  They were setting up the vat, thought the Icefalcon, and wondered what substance the generalissimo would use this time to flesh out the numbers of his creations. The Talking Stars People had gotten most of the mules.

  Not that the Icefalcon had any intention of lingering to find out. The naked cold of being bodiless had grown to a torment, and the ever-present sense of suffocation, the formless anxiety and grief, were making it harder and harder to concentrate. He felt weary and scraped, exhausted and craving sleep-Cold Death had warned him against sleep.

  It would be night outside. His mind was already charting the passageway between the two sets of Doors-cleared now of weeds, gauging the hundred feet of slick blue ice tunnel to be negotiated...

  He stepped between two clones and laid his hands on the locked inner Doors.

  And could not pass through.

  The shock was an abrupt one, almost physical. After a little practice he had moved through wood or stone or metal like a ghost, matters of the physical world as irrelevant to him as the pains of demons.

  But the Doors were magic. The wall in which they were set was magic, wrought long ago to forbid the passage of the Dark Ones. Probably-although he certainly meant to check it inch by inch-the whole of the outer wall of the Keep was so imbued with spells.

  As long as the Doors were shut, he was trapped.

  Chapter 15

  "I will eat them all!" The deep toneless shouting hammered flatly on the black walls, echoing from some remote place. "I will eat them up!"

  "What's he saying?" Tir asked almost without sound, not sure if he understood the ha'al speech correctly. There was a goatish sound to the words, not human at all.

  Hethya turned the horn cover of the lamp just the tiniest bit, uncovering only a hole or two, enough to outline the white leathery leaves, the unspeakable shapes of the fungal horrors that crusted the snout of the fountain where it emerged from the wall.

  "He's talking of eating everything or everybody." The words were a bare whisper. They'd already learned that sound carried farther in the straight halls of the Keep of Shadow. "He's gone mad, I think. It'll be one of the clones."

  While Tir stayed back with the lamp, Hethya edged between the obscene jungles to what had been the fountain's basin and dipped both their water bottles full. Some of the leaves were white, others black and shiny as jewels or furred like bison, shapes barely recognizable as what had been the leaves of potatoes, or peas, or squash. "Faith, you'd think they'd die in the dark, after all these years."

  "They grow on magic." Tir drank gratefully from the dripping bottle she handed him. "They should have dirt and stuff to eat, too, like we do at the Keep-Lord Brig showed me, he's in charge of the crypts-but there's magic here, too." He shivered, and it seemed to him that the bleached leaves moved. "The magic is still alive."

  "Faith." She hooked the water bottles to her belt, listening. Far off came a dull pounding, like a moron child beating on a wall, but huge and viciously strong. As she moved off Tir caught something, some anomalous shape, from the corner of his eye and turned back to look.

  For a moment there was a trick of shadow, of the movement of the lamp no doubt, where the tangled vines swung and clustered around the fountain, so that Tit's heart stood still with terror.

  But there really wasn't anyone there.

  Not a gleam of bald-shaved head or deep-sunk watching eyes. The noise he'd thought for one instant to be a soft-whistled tune was only the wind moving through the corridors.

  The thought came into his mind, You'd be happier away from the light. Happier in the dark alone.

  Tir knew he would be. Since leaving the dark warm protection of the Keep of Dare he had encountered nothing but pain and terror and grief, and he never wanted to go outdoors again.

  Still, he turned away and hurried after Hethya, and tried not to listen to what was almost a voice, whispering among the leaves in the dark.

  They had to open the Doors sometime.

  The Icefalcon stood, his whole existence a hideous wrack of anxiety, in the lambent golden shadows of the triple cell Vair had taken as his theater of operations, watching the generalissimo and his tame mage argue.

  "Savages!" Bektis' gray velvet sleeve bellied like a wing with the theatrical indignation of his gesture. "Savages! Too stupid to consider using the apparatus for their own advantage, though of course they never could. But they don't know that. And they're too stupid even to try!"

  Vair regarded him narrowly across the table set up at the head of the vat. "And this is what you see, is it, sorcerer, in that scrying glass of yours? That the karnach no longer exists?"

  "My Lord, the White Raiders began dismantling it before our Doors were even sealed! They've smashed the luminar-broken the core rods-" His honey-flower tenor went squeaky with fury, the only time the Icefalcon had truly believed him to be a mage as Ingold was a mage, with a mage's instincts. "What they couldn't break they tipped into crevasses in the ice! It is gone, my Lord! Gone!"

  "And so you don't have to put yourself in peril by attempting to retrieve it?" Vair cocked his head, primrose eyes cold. "Is that what you're telling me?"

  Bektis drew himself tall, his beard rippling with the jut of his chin. The Icefalcon noted briefly that Bektis' beard, though waist-length and white as winter ermine, was perfectly combed and bore none of the matted and sweaty appearance of the hair and beards of Vair's warriors.

  He must work at it for hours a day. Even Vair's long gray hair, though dressed back in a ridge, looked as if he'd been through a battle. Perhaps a spell kept the wizard's beard clean?

  "What I'm saying is truth, my Lord!"

  Vair lowered his eyes again, counting out the crystalline needles from their box. He worked deftly, moving them onto the tabletop with his single hand. The Icefalcon, his mind still charred by the memories of the clones his shadow had spoken to, could barely look at them, could barely endure remaining in this room.

  The doorway and the ceiling's four corners were strung with demon-scares, which was a relief, for it was growing more and more difficult to push aside the demons and elementals that oozed through the clogged darkness and snuffed among the bleeding lichens.

  "Truth includes the fact that you turned tail quickly enough when the Raiders charged. I thought you had spells of illusion, spells of fear."

  "Spells of illusion and fear only guarantee a battle if the enemy isn't ready for them, Lord. The Raiders have followed us since we came onto the ice..."

  Longer than that, old man.

  "And they quite clearly have a shaman of their own." He fussed at the gold-mesh straps that held the crystalline Device to his hand, and the Icefalcon, close to him for the first time, saw that the edges of the thing had worn the flesh into oozing blisters on wrist and fingers and also, he now saw, beneath the jewelled collar that was evidently part of the ensemble.

/>   He must be sleeping in it.

  Yet there was no sign of padding, no sign that he had put a bandage or wrap of any sort between his skin and the enchanted metal and stone.

  "Without the power of civilized magic, you understand, they were no match for me..."

  "But they were strong enough to frighten you?"

  "There was no point in continuing."

  "Hear me, Bektis, Servant of Illusion." Vair raised his head from his counting, and his voice was level, chill as iron left outside to freeze.

  "And hear me well. I saved you from the wrath of the Bishop Govannin for one purpose and one purpose only, that you assist me in retaking my rights to the lands of the South. You proved useless against that bitch Yori-Ezrikos in open battle, even with that precious bauble of yours."

  Bektis clutched his jeweled hand to his breast, irrational fury blanching his face. "I would scarcely say that saving you, and twelve hundred of your men, from being slain by your wife was 'useless,' my Lord. Nor the knowledge I've given you about the weapons and Devices that may still exist, hidden in Dare's Keep. And this bauble, as you call it, is the Hand of Harilomne, greatest of the . . ."

  "I don't care if it's the second-best festival hat of God's Mother. Your Harilomne, for all his talk of studying the Devices of the Times Before, may have been as great a faker as yourself. I'm a patient man, Bektis. You will help me in this matter now, or you will find that my forbearance runs thin. Do you understand?"

  "You do not understand..." Bektis was still clutching at the Hand of Harilonme, trembling with rage. Then he seemed to recollect himself and lowered his eyes. "I understand, my Lord."

  "Good." Vair returned to sorting the needles, white-gloved fingers arranging them by crystal, iron, gold. "Now you inform me a new band of Raiders is moving up from the south. So we have little time. As soon as it grows light you will cast your illusions, make the Raiders outside the tunnel believe there is something-a stray mammoth, perhaps, or something else edible-that they must seek a good distance away. Near a crevasse, if possible, where we can gather up their bodies from the bottom. I need men, Bektis."

  He pushed the last of the needles in its place, with obsessive neatness, and raised his eyes again. "Four more of the Hastroaals have died and two of the Ugals gone mad."

  "My Lord, I warned you about mixing the flesh of the source with other things."

  "And despite your warnings I have eighty men where I would only have had a score. To accomplish the taking of Dare's Keep I will need as many again, and again. Have the Raiders gathered up the bodies of the slain?"

  Bektis inclined his head. "They lie in a crevasse in the ice, not far from the tunnel mouth. Not deep." He still toyed with the Hand, stroking the smooth facets of the jewels, as if for reassurance.

  "Good. And they'll certainly be fresh. You're to go with Prinyippos and his party when they fetch them and retrieve any fragments of the karnach that you can find."

  "My Lord..."

  "At dawn, Bektis." Vair started for the door. "That's what? Two chimes of the clock from now?"

  Bektis inclined his head again, not looking happy. "Two chimes it is, my Lord. But..."

  Vair turned like a panther, a sudden swirling movement that startled even the Icefalcon, his left hand jerking free the curved sword at his waist. His draw was slow, the Icefalcon noted-it was hard to bring the hooks to bear to steady the scabbard-but there was trained and deadly speed as he dropped to fighting stance, "What was that?"

  Bektis had fluttered back, startled, out of the way, and only shook his head. "What was what, Lord?" His voice squeaked with panic.

  Slowly Vair straightened and walked back to the table where he had been arranging the needles.

  In their midst lay a woman's comb, black horn set with three garnets. There was nothing in the least odd about it-Vair sheathed his sword awkwardly to pick it up-except that it had not been there before.

  Demons fed on the magic buried deep in the walls of the Keep. Knockings and murmurings filled the darkness. Climbing the stairs that Tir had climbed in his dreams, traversing passageways knee-deep in dead black brittle vines that made not a sound under his shadowy feet, the Icefalcon heard them.

  Lights flickered among the choking plugs of lichen and fungus, glistened on the beards of icicles that depended from cracked ceilings and broken fountains. In the Aisle, or in those chambers where the clones stacked weapons and food, small objects would sometimes rise up and fling themselves against the walls.

  One man ran shrieking into the corridor, striking at something no one else could see as the marks of teeth appeared in his cheeks and hands.

  The Icefalcon moved on. The chambers that had been clear in Tir's dream, behind the triple archway and the rose windows on the Aisle's northeastern wall, were an impassable bolus of mutant groundnut and squashes through which he slipped like water.

  Vair will make me lead him there, Tir had said. But why?

  The hall of the crystal pillars was dead to magic and clear of the encroachment of vegetation. So was the round vestibule with its tiny doors-from whom did they expect an attack this deep in the center of the Keep?

  The Dark Ones could change size at will. Another chamber close by, spherical and small, a round lens of heavy crystal in one wall that showed the hall of the pillars-the Icefalcon looked but could see no Rune of Silence worked into its doors or walls.

  Something that by its leaves had once been a bean plant had filled most of one wall with clinging runners and the floor with a mulch of stinking decay.

  A guardroom?

  The clock chimed dimly in the distance. Warily, the Icefalcon passed through the vestibule's door, and despite the pain that grew steadily in him, the ache and coldness that more and more threatened to swamp his concentration, he felt also the tenseness of danger, the sense of something waiting for him in the dark.

  Waiting, he thought, for a long time.

  But even the eyes of shadow that could see demons saw nothing amiss. Bare black walls, bare black floor. From the door he had a clear view through all the archways to the end of the succession of ever shrinking rooms, and all were bare to the walls. To the best of his recollection it had been so in Tir's dream.

  Or had he, the Icefalcon, shadow-walker and interloper, seen only part of the child's dreaming memory?

  Had there been something in that final chamber, hidden behind the two men whose shadows lurched across the walls?

  Or did he dream, too, now?

  He walked the length of the great chamber, passed between the crystal pilasters, crossed the smaller room behind. A sound made him turn, but there was nothing. Only the blank ebon walls.

  More slowly he walked on, and from somewhere he heard the thread of someone whistling-a phrase of music, then silence.

  A smaller room, crystal pillars, a chamber smaller yet. Beyond another arch another chamber, dark and tiny and anonymous; another arch. The cold in the core of his mind was almost overwhelming, icy panic and growing darkness, and a sense that he trod where he should not tread.

  Go back.

  Go back or die.

  Was it his ancestors who spoke to him? Black Hummingbird, who had first slept on the slopes of Haunted Mountain, to hold the shell and the iron flower that let him hear the voices of the Stars?

  One of the Dream Things-the Flowered Caterpillar or the Mouse's Child, that sometimes lied and sometimes told the truth? Or something in the blackness, something that was trying to keep him from this final secret, the secret Tir had begged not to be forced to reveal?

  It seemed to him that more crystal pilasters glittered before him, a double line of them. Surely there had been only four rooms, three archways? He counted three or four more before him, and a guessing of others beyond.

  A trap?

  A man sat in the darkness before him, a little to one side of the next arch.

  There was something very wrong with the darkness, something amiss about the shape and perception of that chamber and the next
. Voices seemed to be murmuring all around him, a mutter of anger, desperation, and a loneliness that had long ago plunged over the black edge of abyssal madness.

  Go back. Go back right now.

  The man before him stood. "Nyagchilios?" He spoke his true name, the name of the pilgrim-falcon in the tongue of the Talking Stars. "Icefalcon?"

  The Icefalcon retreated, terror of a trap flaring in him, a trap whose nature he could not even guess. But he knew, as surely as he knew the name the man had said, that if he lingered even another few moments he would be caught in some unguessable doom. Carefully, never turning his back, he edged away, through chamber after chamber, toward the door.

  The man-or illusion, he wasn't sure which-took a step or two after him, then stopped. But the Icefalcon could see him between the pilasters as he retreated, see him clearly in the dark: the broad shoulders beneath a ragged mantle of brown wool, the close-cropped white heard and the face gouged with scars and creases and laugh lines. Blue eyes that hid terrible knowledge under wise brightness, like sunlight on the well at the cosmos' heart.

  If any illusion could have called him into the gullet of a snare, thought the Icefalcon, it would have been that one. Because of all people he could have summoned to his aid, the first on his list would certainly have been Ingold Inglorion.

  The second chime sounded as the Icefalcon emerged from the narrow door of the vestibule. He hastened down the hidden stair, passed like a fleeting ghost through the jungle of vines. It was in his mind to make a detour and fetch Tir and Hethya, but aside from the fact that they would undoubtedly still be awake, it would do them little good to walk straight into the arms of Bektis.

  Who he needed now, he thought, was Cold Death. There had to be a way to send warning to Blue Child and her band that the illusion of the hunt they pursued would lead them to disaster. Possibly Cold Death knew it already.

  The Doors stood open. Lamps gleamed in the dense white mists of the passage, in the ice tunnel that stretched beyond. The cold there cut his brain like a knife, but he welcomed it: he was out of the Keep, out of the trap of its walls, running now for the sleeping flesh of his body like a jack hare running for his burrow, with the glowing hounds of hell coming behind.