Icefalcons Quest

by Barbara Hambly

  The bright glare of morning smote him. He was free.

  Another war band coming up, he thought. Some scouting or hunting party that had cut the trail of the Earthsnake People and followed to see what hunting they sought in the Ice in the North. What hunting indeed?

  He would not, he thought, pausing, be able to see them once he returned to his flesh.

  It was dangerous, the tearing and weight of exhaustion and pain tightening on him like the tightening of the torture boot or the rack. Still, he was going to be coming back this way in his human flesh to lead Tir and Hethya to freedom. After a moment's thought, the Icefalcon flung himself skyward, flying the way Gil-Shalos-and long ago Dove in the Sun-had told him that they flew in dreams.

  The ice dropped away below him. Seracs reared like fortresses, aretes and nunataks traced in black the shape of buried mountains behind the green-white blister of the ice. Higher the Icefalcon rose, through a gray mistiness that almost hid the land. It would be easy, he thought, to become lost here, to become lost entirely from his body. To rise and rise, above all cloud, until his soul united with sun and air.

  He understood suddenly that the pain and cold and loneliness he felt were the result of trying to hold the shape of the body that lay somewhere in the Ice. The terror and suffocation would last only as long as he clung to the memory of that shape, clung to the illusion of lungs and heart, the intention of returning to that abandoned flesh. Indeed, they were nearly unbearable now. If he embraced the sunlight and the air, he would be free.

  Or was that another illusion of the demons of the air?

  He looked about him, as his namesake would look about for the white hares of the ice.

  He saw the crevasse where Blue Child had tipped the broken Dark Lightning: no child of the Real World would hold a weapon that could so easily be taken back by its original owners and turned again. Antlike men slipped and fell near the crevasse with the clumsiness of those who had never navigated on snow, hauling what pieces they could find or dragging the bodies of the slain.

  To the west he saw Blue Child's band-nowhere near any crevasse-and among the rock ridges southeast of the Keep's bubble the dark ragged assemblage of the Earthsnake People. Far off, coming up from the south on the trails left by the others, was the new band, well over two hundred strong.

  The Icefalcon flew toward them, effortless as a silver rag of cloud. From the air he recognized Breaks Noses, younger brother to Loses His Way, war leader of the Empty Lakes People. Bundled thick in double-sewn fur and mammoth wool, others followed him: Buttonwillow, Spindle, and Doesn't Bathe. The friends and kin of Loses His Way. And with them Beautiful Girl, the mother of Twin Daughter-the wife of Loses His Way.

  Cold raked him, tearing his attention, shredding his mind. Terror swamped him, and he was falling again, plunging toward the white and blue and black of the broken ice. Gray things and darkness clotted his sight and the laughter of the winds his hearing.

  Elementals.

  It was hard now to pull his attention away, hard to fight clear of the terror, to remember that he had no bones to break. He couldn't breathe, and weariness rent him beyond bearing.

  He saw the shadow form of his hands and arms that had once been clothed in wolf-hide tunic, in the appearance he knew, torn tatters of ripped clothing, flesh gone and bones bare from biceps to wrist.

  Something like a vast spider of cloud and ice-fog clawed out his entrails, and he could not think his body whole again. Elementals vast as mammoths walked over the snow below him like pond-skimmers, waiting for him to land.

  Go away. Go away. Go away.

  He leveled out a few feet above the snow, hearing them like swarming bees above his head. A flying tangle of shreds and bones, he skimmed the broken whiteness, dodged between hummocks and ridges, seeking the crevasse where his body lay.

  The thoughts of the air and the brilliant, hurting sunlight frightened him now, and he found himself crying for the comforting armor of muscle and bone.

  Voices below, cold and hard as the shattering of glass. A bellowed war cry and the clash of steel. Light exploding among the gashes in the ice, and columns of steam, hard and nearly tactile, marble and diamonds and then gray, all-choking fog.

  Dread such as he had never known slammed his heart.

  He dropped to the ice at the head of the crevasse, leaped down the jagged blocks as though possessed again of human legs and human muscles. Tracks of booted feet marred the snow before him, booted feet and those bound in rawhide.

  Another levin-bolt and the crack of thunder, another billow of steam. The Icefalcon raced between the narrow sapphire walls, hearing a man curse in the choking mists. "Little bitch got away."

  No, thought the Icefalcon. No.

  "Don't kill that one." He heard Crested Egret's voice as he came around the projecting shoulder of ice and saw four or five clones holding the struggling, thrashing Loses His Way, dragging him down with their sheer weight. Two clones lay dead in the crumble of snow, and a third sat bowed over, his back to the frozen wall, numbly clutching his belly.

  Bektis emerged from the fog, stuffing his chilblained hand, the Hand of Harilomne still flashing on his fingers, into an ermine muff. The smoke of a heat-spell surrounded him, mingling white with the general vapors as he scrambled down from where the deeper gash of the chasm narrowed and ascended. He was panting and looked put out. Even his beard was mussed. "You should have those guards of yours flogged," he snapped at the little officer. "The fools let her slip by!"

  Crested Egret's expression did not change. "I'll see it done, Lord sorcerer." He had a prim voice-he was one of the Alketch who, like Vair, had kept up shaving even in the wilds and battles of the North. "Which of them failed you?"

  Bektis hesitated a moment, looking from man to man of those standing near, then said, "That one, that one, and that one," pointing at random, the Icefalcon thought. Two of the men looked startled and angry; the other, a clone, seemed barely aware that he'd been singled out. Before anything further could be said someone called out, "Here's another!"

  No. No. No.

  Steam still poured in a misty river from the ice-cave where they'd spent ... last night? The night before? Two clones emerged dragging something. Loses His Way flung himself against his captors like a chained bull and bellowed.

  They were carrying the Icefalcon's body.

  "Dead, sir," said one of the clones. The Icefalcon knew those words from his time in the South.

  "Your little pretty-boy, is it?" another added in a kind of mixed dialect as Loses His Way wrenched at the hands that held him. "Not bad," said someone else, or something along those lines; there was crude laughter and jostling.

  Crested Egret silenced them with a couple of flat, yapped orders, and they bound Loses His Way, not without difficulty, and slung the Icefalcon's body on the sledge with the two dead clones and the wounded man. All the men worked together to drag the sledge back out of the crevasse, slipping and skidding and falling on the ice.

  No. The Icefalcon was trembling, or would have been, he thought, had he flesh to tremble in. He ran back along the mist-drowned crevasse, seeking for Cold Death-melt-pools and scars, blue as glass, showed where Bektis had struck at her with the lightning of his crystal Hand, which had evidently been designed for single combat and spells rather than armies or groups. But of Cold Death herself he could find nothing.

  The fog was thick here, and demons slipped like lampreys from the ice walls, reaching out to him with thin white hands of pain. Cold Death! He tried to call his sister's name. Cold Death!

  But there was nothing. Frantic, he turned and ran after Bektis and the retreating guards through the bloodstained snow to the blue tunnel, keeping as far behind them as he dared. Hurting, shaken, and more frightened than he had ever been, he saw before him the black Doors of the Keep framing torchlight within.

  The dead chime of the clock reached out to meet him, and as the warriors dragged their booty through-living and dead and one body that was not quite e
ither-the Icefalcon slipped in after them and heard the Doors shut again behind.

  Chapter 16

  "Huh," said Hethya. "So it's yourself again."

  She'd been dreaming about her daughter and the forest Keep. Dreaming about the rooms that had been carved off the crypts in those long years between the time when the Dark Ones had returned to their underground realms and the time when the forest Keeps had ceased to be fortresses with the return of order and the rule of the High Kings of Gae.

  She'd been playing hide-and-seek with her child while her scholar mother investigated the caches of long-buried junk at the bottom of those twisty wooden stairs: hibernant glowstones gone dark with time, old chests of brown brittle scrolls, broken furniture and hidden doorways concealing still-deeper fastnesses, still-more-curious treasures.

  Her daughter could only toddle but staggered with a child's blithe tumbledown delight among the shadowy warrens, barely illuminated by the lamps that Hethya and her mother bore; her laughter was gay in the dark.

  But with the Icefalcon's appearance in the crypts of Prandhays Keep Hethya transfigured once more to a woman of thirty, a little blowsy, a little haggard, with bitter eyes and the dirty hair of one who has traveled far and hard. She put her hands on her hips, and leaned her back against a plastered archway, and asked, "And what is it you'll be wanting now?"

  It was hard to speak the words. "Your help," he said. "Please." The Icefalcon took her hand-his own no more than shreds of flesh clinging to white bone-and led her across into the Shadow Keep, dark tunnels cancerous with fungus and strange white ivies.

  He was very cold now, disoriented and weary beyond speaking, every wound and gash given him by the demons of the misty air open, bleeding, weakening him; drawing away his concentration from the task of keeping bone and flesh clear in his memory. The sun kept coming back into his mind, and the free flight in the air, the desire to dissolve and to sleep.

  He was beginning to realize that he might not make it back to his body. If it were destroyed he knew he would not last long but did not know what would become of him in that event.

  "Did you find a way out?" asked Hethya. A reasonable request, but in his weariness he felt a flash of dull rage at her, a desire, unprecedented in his experience, to strike her across the face.

  "No." It was unworthy of a person of the Talking Stars-and also a pointless expenditure of energy-to show anger. Also, he would not give her that. So he kept his voice neutral.

  "I was unable to leave the Keep until the Doors opened, and then I found Bektis had encountered Cold Death: she fled from him, I know not where. Here."

  There was a guard outside the door of the triple cell where the vat and its horrors had been set up, one of the very few that still possessed a solid door. The corpses of the slain had been dragged there and heaped in a corner; bundled bales of dead foliage and whatever else could be gathered: fungus, the last of the wood, a dead mule.

  A new, stout bar had been slotted into the makeshift sockets on the door, though the Icefalcon knew that Loses His Way was bound. Had he not been, the wood, long dehydrated in the cold, might not have held him.

  Because it was a dream the Icefalcon passed easily through the thick wood, and Hethya stepped gamely behind.

  "Faith!" she whispered, shocked.

  Not, the Icefalcon was certain, because of the bodies. Anyone who had passed through the Time of the Dark had seen bodies, in all stages of decomposition and ruin. Certainly this woman had seen worse if she'd watched the making of the clones.

  Even the fact that the clones had begun to decay in the warmth of the Keep was something she already knew. She went over to where the Icefalcon's own body lay on the pile, forehead and eyelids smudged with the remains of Cold Death's ward-spells, and touched his face, something the Icefalcon found extremely disturbing.

  "Faith, are you a ghost, then?"

  "No." He said it a good deal more vehemently than he had intended. "I am alive, only separated from my flesh for the time being."

  It crossed his mind to wonder whether that was in fact the case. Whether removal from the ice-cave, and from Cold Death's spells, had in fact killed the life-spark of the emptied flesh so that he would return only to die as the body died.

  Could he return at all without Cold Death's help?

  "But I can be of no help to you if I return to my flesh in a locked room with guards outside. You will have to get me out."

  On the floor beside the piled corpses, Loses His Way lay chained, spanceled the way the Alketch spanceled deserters or criminals, wrists locked to ankles, with a cord around his neck tied to the short chain that joined the ankle manacles, only long enough to permit him to breathe as long as he did not struggle.

  While the Icefalcon watched, Loses His Way tried to twist free his wrists nevertheless, veins bulging out at his temples with the tightening of the noose, until he dropped back limp again, chest heaving with the thread of incoming air.

  "Leave it, me bonny," said Hethya softly, going to kneel beside him. "Leave it, you great fool. You'll only murder yourself." Her hand reached again, touched the blood-smeared red-gold hair.

  The Icefalcon heard footfalls in the corridor and stepped back, shadow hand touching shadow sword. Hethya, her eyes on Loses His Way's face, swung around in shock as the door opened and Vair na-Chandros strode in at the head of a small squad of warriors, and her hand went to her mouth.

  "They can't see you," pointed out the Icefalcon, catching her arm to steady her. It interested him that for once she did not scream. "This is only a dream, you know."

  Vair gestured to the dead. The clones, without a word spoken, began to strip them, pulling off footgear, weapons, furs. He glanced down at Loses His Way and said to Bektis in the Wathe, "What do you think? The lords of the borderlands tell me that White Raiders are without loyalty to their own people and can easily be turned to fight against other Raiders."

  "This has been my experience as well, illustrious Lord." As usual Bektis bowed a little as he spoke. Though immaculate as always-and still smoking very faintly with a personal heat-spell-the Icefalcon thought there was a suggestion of tension to the corners of his eyes, that the lines of strain were cut very deep indeed in the high dome of the forehead, and when he stroked the Hand of Harilomne his long fingers trembled.

  "Indeed, for several years there was a barbarian in the High King's Guard, and he showed no compunction in turning his sword against his own brethren. They are utterly without loyalty."

  "And you are utterly without brains," the Icefalcon said, "if you don't know the difference between my kindred the Talking Stars People and such cowardly vermin as the Salt People, the Empty Lakes People, and the Black Rock People who attacked the lands of the Wathe. And twice so if you think that I would raise my hand against the children of my own Ancestors, you witless dotard."

  "Faith, is that a fact?" asked Hethya, surprised.

  Did she really believe that such obvious trash as the Black Rock People could be related to the People of the Talking Stars? The Icefalcon opened his mouth to flay her ignorance, but Vair went on: "To he sure we could use another whole man in our forces, if we could be sure of his loyalty."

  "Loyalty?" roared Loses His Way, heaving furiously in his bonds. His voice came out hoarse from strangulation.

  More's the pity, reflected the Icefalcon, that he didn't strangle himself into silence.

  Noon had always taught him that the longer an enemy thought you could not understand his speech, the better off you would be. "Loyalty to you, you night-walking jackal? You murderer of my kin? Before I'd take one step back at your orders I'd walk over a cliff!"

  The Icefalcon closed his eyes in momentary pained annoyance. "So you know our tongue." Vair stepped close to the bound man, his white cloak falling over the bulging, straining arms. "Your kin were fools to attack. As they shall learn."

  From his belt he unhooked his whip and slashed Loses His Way hard across the face. The warrior stared up at him with blazing azure
eyes and, unable to spit in the face of the man standing above him, spit instead at his groin.

  Vair's mouth worked once, sharply. Without another word he began to beat the bound man before him, lashing at his face and shoulders with the whip until blood ran down into the tawny beard, then, when the whip would not cut through the tough hide and fur of Loses His Way's clothing, kicking him hard and systematically in the belly and back. Neither man made a sound.

  When Vair was finished and stepped back, trying not to pant, Loses His Way raised his gory head and through the broken stumps of his front teeth, spat at him again. It was blood this time.

  Vair's voice was shaking with anger. "My Truth-Finder Shakas Kar," he said, "will give you far more time than you will wish to regret that."

  As he turned to go Loses His Way spat once more, the red gobbet striking the hem of the snowy cloak. Bektis and the clones departed in their lord's wake, the clones with their arms full of clothing and weaponry.

  "He is a fool." The Icefalcon looked down at the big man lying, panting, his cheek in the puddle of his blood. "But at least this matter diverted Bektis from looking at me, whom, beard or no beard, he would probably have known."

  He looked down again at his own body, naked now like the others. Would he die, he wondered, in the cold? "And he might have seen the Runes of Ward on my face. It certainly kept any man present in such fear of speaking that no one remarked that I had no wound. Come."

  He took her by the hand again and led the way into the corridor and down to the cell where the clones were dumping coats, shirts, long strips of rawhide binding, and the rag stuffing they wore beneath for warmth.

  The cell's door had long since crumbled, so they stationed another guard before it, another clone. But while the men were still unburdening themselves the slender scout Crested Egret strode down the corridor, all his creamy braids fluttering like pennons, and called out "My Lord! My Lord, the boy has escaped!"