Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “I departed,” said the Icefalcon. “Though I fail to see how my comings and goings are the affair of the Empty Lakes People.”

  “Blue Child is now the warchief of the Talking Stars People,” said Loses His Way. “Even before the coming of the Eaters in the Night this was reason enough for concern among those of us who hunt the same mammoth and pasture our horses in the same ravines. Now that the mammoth move south, and white filth grows in the ravines of the homelands—now that the Ice in the North rolls south to cover valleys that once belonged to the Empty Lakes People—it is a matter for concern that she rules your people instead of you.”

  The cliff was lower toward the northwest, and the Icefalcon recalled how squirreltail grass grew thicker in that direction, amid stands of juniper brush that masked the cliff’s rim from the direction of Bison Hill. Under cover of these junipers the two men scrambled up and glided through the thickets to higher ground.

  At the cliff’s top a dark shaggy shape rustled up to them out of the grass, a yellow-eyed war-dog, burned like Loses His Way over his shoulders and back, like Loses His Way mourning his losses and his pain in silence.

  He licked the warchief’s hand and wriggled with grateful joy to have his ears rubbed—sniffed the Icefalcon suspiciously but followed in silence. The Icefalcon raised up on his knees to put his head above the clusters of leaves but saw no sign of travelers as far as he could look west along the road.

  They were evidently staying put for the day.

  “For one thing, the Empty Lakes People never owned a thumb-breadth of the land in the North,” he pointed out. “The starlight wrote our names on forest and stone from the Haunted Mountain across to the Night River Country, and ours it remains, Ice or no Ice, forever. Will these take you and your brother here back to your people?” He nodded to the dog and held out to Loses His Way two tubes of pemmican and one of the several sacks of pine nuts. “I hunt this Wise One and his warriors, and in the North I am told the white filth grows thick. There is no hunting in it. I need all I can carry.”

  The brilliant eyes narrowed. “You hunt this Wise One? I thought you had returned to find Gsi Kethko.”

  “Gsi Kethko?” The name had two meanings. In the tongue of the Salt People it signified the hallucinogenic pods of the wild morning glory, but in the more melodic (and altogether more perfect) language of the Talking Stars People it meant the Antlered Spider, one of the fifteen Dream Things that sometimes carried messages from the Watchers Behind the Stars.

  “The Wise One,” Loses His Way amplified.

  “He was a member of Plum’s family,” remembered the Icefalcon, not sure why the warchief thought he should be interested. “A little man so high who dressed his hair with elm twigs. He stayed with us when we camped on the Night River just before the Summer Moot, the year that I departed. I don’t think he was a very good Wise One. We nearly starved to death waiting for him to charm antelope, and his information about the salt grass along the Cruel River left a great deal to be desired. Why would I seek out the Antlered Spider?”

  “I thought he might have spoken to someone else concerning the spells he laid on the dreamvine that your old chief Noon took, at the Summer Moot in the Year of the White Foxes, the year that you left.” Loses His Way turned the end of one of his mustache braids around his finger, but his eyes did not leave the Icefalcon’s face in the piebald shadows of the thicket. The Icefalcon felt a coldness inside him, as if he already knew what else his enemy was going to say.

  “The draft is prepared on the night the chief takes it,” the Icefalcon said, his soft, husky voice suddenly flat. “He himself gathers the dreamvine before he goes up to the mountain. There can be no spells laid on it since no one else touches the pods.”

  “According to Antlered Spider, Noon always gathered the pods in the same place,” the warchief replied. “Along Pretty Water Creek, between the white rock shaped like a tortoise and the three straight cottonwoods.”

  The place flashed at once to the Icefalcon’s mind, and he realized that what Loses His Way said was true. Noon had taken him there a hundred times in his childhood and told him of the properties of the low-growing, innocuous-looking vine: how it was prepared by the warchief on the mountain and what it did.

  “The Antlered Spider said that Blue Child took powdered elf-root and had him lay words on it, so that when the powder was mixed with water and painted on the pods of the vine, the face that Noon would see in his vision at the Summer Moot would be yours. And it was your face that Noon saw, wasn’t it?”

  “How do you know this?” The cold in him deepened, a dream remembered and repressed—the old man’s face impassive, eyes dead, empty with grief. The Icefalcon, and his cousin Red Fox, and their friends Stays Up All Night and Fifty Lovers, sitting by the Moot Fire, the talk soft and nervous as it always was at such times. Then Noon walked out of the night into the red world of the firelight, the white shell held out stiffly in his hand and death in his eyes.

  Always just stepping into the firelight. Always just holding out his hand.

  “My son …”

  My son.

  But he had known almost before Noon spoke what he was going to say. They had all looked at him, his kindred. Looked at him, and moved away.

  The cold crystallized within him to a core of ice, as the cold had then.

  “Why did he tell you this?” It astonished him how normal his voice sounded. But he was the Icefalcon, and it behooved him not to show his feelings, particularly not to one of the Empty Lakes People.

  “He was dying,” said Loses His Way. “Fever Lady had kissed him at the winter horse camp. The snow was deep outside, and I could not leave.”

  “What was he doing in your horse camp?” The Icefalcon drew a deep breath. Far off over the badlands, thunder rolled, soft with distance. The scent of the storm came rushing at them on the blue-black cloak of the wind.

  “He wasn’t really one of Plum’s family.” Loses His Way shrugged. “He was the son of my maternal aunt’s husband’s stepbrother. The Empty Lakes People drove him out in the Year of the Crows for putting a barren spell on his sister because she had more horses than he did. No one liked him. Blue Child took him in.”

  “Blue Child took in a Wise One of your people?” The Icefalcon was shocked to the marrow of his bones. “Took him in and had him put a spell on the chief of her own people?”

  Loses His Way nodded. The Icefalcon was silent. Winter-night silence. Death silence. The silence in the eyes of an old man who has just been told by his Ancestors that the boy he has raised from childhood, the young man he looked upon as his successor, is the one They want, the one They have chosen to bring a message to them written in the crimson extremities of pain.

  The torture sacrifice, the Long Sacrifice of summer, that the people may live through the winter to come.

  Lightning flared, purple-white against the nigrous mountains of cloud. Gray rain stood in slanted columns over distant hills. The wind veered: Bektis, at a guess, witching the weather to turn the storm away. Shamans of the Talking Stars People generally didn’t care if they got wet.

  The Icefalcon observed it all, staring into distance, feeling nothing.

  “I don’t know whether Gsi Kethko told anyone else of this,” said Loses His Way, after a time, stroking his long mustache. “But for two years now I have been watching for you, waiting to see if you will return to your people and claim your due.”

  * * *

  “Are you all right, honey?”

  Tir sat back on his heels, trembling, small hands propped on his thighs. Hethya ran a competent palm over his clammy forehead, then helped him to his feet and led him away from the little puddle of vomit among the ferns at the base of the big cottonwood tree. Some distance off she knelt down again and took the boy in her arms.

  She was a big woman, like the farmwives and blacksmiths in the Keep. Her arms were strong around him and the quilting of her coat smooth and cold under his face, and her thick braids, tickling his chin,
smelled good. Tir rested his head against her shoulder and tried not to feel ashamed of himself for getting sick.

  It was weak, like the little kids. He was seven and a half. With the deaths of Geppy and Thya and Brit and all the other older children in the Summerless Year, he had stepped into a position of semicommand in the games of the younger.

  Tears stung his eyes, remembering his friends. Remembering Rudy.

  “There’s no shame in it, being afraid.” Hethya’s big fingers toyed gently with his hair, separating it into locks on his forehead, as his mother sometimes still did. “Even great kings and heroes get afraid. And sometimes that happens, after you’ve been real afraid.”

  Tir was silent, trying to sort out what he had felt clinging to the limb of the tree. He was still sweating, though under his furry jacket he felt icy cold, and his stillness alternated with waves of shivering that he could not control.

  “You did well,” she said.

  In fact, when Bektis had spun around and cried out “Raiders!” and the three Akulae whipped their curved southern swords from their sheaths, from those dark hollows in his mind Tir heard someone else’s voice, one of those other people, say as if thinking it to himself, Get out of everybody’s way.

  Lying on the branch of the tree, he had felt curiously little fear. Too many memories of killing men himself—of those other boys killing men—lay too near the surface. Memories of terror in battle, memories of grief and remorse, memories of the grim rush of heat that drove in the knife, the spear, the sword. Watching Hethya, watching the Akulae, cutting and hacking at the men and women who ran stumbling from Bektis’ unseen illusions filled him with emotion that he could not name, closer to sadness and horror than fear. But strong. Horrifyingly strong.

  The emotion, whatever it was, left him wrung out, shaken, sickened, so that as soon as the fighting was over he slid down the cottonwood’s trunk and vomited, not even knowing what it was that he felt. He could see the faces of the dying men still. Their faces, and the faces of all those others who had died in ages past by the hands of those whose memories he touched.

  One day he might have to kill somebody himself.

  His face still buried in Hethya’s shoulder, he heard Bektis’ sonorous voice repeating summoning-spells, then the soft scrunch of hooves on leaves and the whuffle of horses’ breath. Looking up, he saw Akula leading two beautiful bay stallions by the bridles, so beautiful they took his breath away. The Keep boasted few horses. Four more stood, eyes rolling, among the trees. Another Akula was tethering them.

  This Akula had a bleeding wound on one arm. Hethya made a little exclamation under her breath and, with a final quick hug, released Tir and stood. “Here,” she said, going to the man. “Let me get that covered.”

  “My dear young lady.” Bektis strolled over to her through the trees, stroking his long white beard and considering the six horses with a self-satisfied smirk. The jeweled device still covered his right hand. He was seldom without it, even if he had no magic to work, and he seemed to enjoy just looking at it, turning it reverently to catch the sunlight, like a vain adolescent admiring a mirror.

  During the fight Tir had seen how lightning and fire had flowed out of it, how strange smokes and rainbow lights seemed to leap from it around the heads of the White Raiders, making them cry out and slash at things only they could see, making their dogs attack one another or bite the legs of the Raiders’ horses. Tir had been badly scared by the Raiders’ dogs.

  “It’s scarcely worth your time. The man will be dead before the wound heals.”

  Hethya opened her mouth to retort, then glanced down at Tir and shut it again. The Akula looked from Bektis’ face to Hethya’s without much comprehension, a thick-muscled man with grim pale eyes. Tir wondered if Akula—any of them—knew enough regular speech to understand what had just been said.

  He’d just begun to learn the ha’al language of the Empire of Alketch and could say Please and Thank you and a number of prayers, though since God presumably spoke all languages he couldn’t imagine why he had to learn, with great difficulty, what God could just as easily understand in the Wathe. But his mother, and Rudy, and Lord Ankres said that the language was a useful thing for a King to know.

  “And now that we have horses in the camp,” said Bektis, drawing close around his face the fur collar of his quilted brown coat and tucking his beard behind a number of scarves, “I think it best we keep the boy tied up until his Lordship arrives. See to it.”

  “Please, Lord Bektis.” Tir stepped forward, his heart pounding. “Please don’t tie me up. If something else happens, if the Raiders come again, I don’t want to be tied up.”

  “So you can run away in the confusion?” Bektis had already started to turn away. There was contempt in his voice, and Tir felt his face flush.

  “I know I wouldn’t get far,” he said with dignity. “Even if I stole a horse, you could just make it turn around and come back to you, couldn’t you? Or scare it, like you scared those people with stuff that wasn’t real, so they couldn’t protect themselves.”

  The wizard’s dark eyes flashed with anger at this implication of cowardice and cheat. “And a fine predicament you’d be in if I hadn’t, boy. We’re not playing children’s games. Do you think the White Raiders would spare a child of your years? I’ve seen children younger than you with their guts staked over five yards of ground. Tie him up,” he added to Hethya. “And give him a lick or two, to mend his manners.”

  He walked away to the edge of the grove, where he settled himself under a tree. Tir saw him take something from a velvet purse under his coat, polish it on his chamois cloth, and set it on a little collapsible silver tripod where the dim sunlight lanced through the thin leaves. Scrying, as old Ingold scried for things in his fragment of yellow crystal. As he’d seen Rudy scry, hundreds of times.

  At the thought of Rudy his throat closed and his eyes grew hot, seeing him fall again through the whirl of snow and darkness. Don’t make him be dead, he prayed. Please don’t make him be dead.

  Hethya’s hand dropped gently onto his shoulder. “Come on, honey,” she said. “We’d better do as he says. I’ll make it as easy on you as I can, and if we’re attacked again I’ll see to it you can get to safety.”

  Tir nodded. He wondered sometimes, lying beside her in the warmth of her blankets, feeling safe while Bektis’ wolves and saber-teeth snuffled around the verges of the camp, if she had a little boy of her own.

  “Who’s his Lordship who’s coming?” he asked softly, as she led him toward a thin sycamore tree where there was shade and grass. “And what’s he going to do? Why does he want me?”

  “Never you mind that, honey,” said Hethya. “I’ll make sure you’re all right.”

  But her eyes avoided his as she said it. She wasn’t lying, he realized. She just knew that she had no power to do that, if Bektis—and his Lordship, whoever he was, and why ever he wanted him—decided to kill him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Shadow passed over the grass.

  The Icefalcon turned, scalp prickling, then scanned the sky. There was no sign of a bird.

  The chill wind of morning rippled miles of grass and brought the smoke of the camp on Bison Hill. They were waiting for someone, the Icefalcon thought. Or for some event, as Wise Ones waited for conjunctions of stars and planets that would increase and focus their power. Above the coulee, black birds now gathered in clouds, but none circled anywhere near the hill.

  A smoke-colored flicker in the corner of his eye, and this time he was sure of it. Ears tilted inquiringly, Yellow-Eyed Dog raised his nose from his paws and sniffed the air. The sky was empty overhead.

  “What is it?” whispered Loses His Way.

  The Icefalcon drew breath and relaxed a little, as much as he ever relaxed or could relax.

  “Cold Death,” he said.

  It was after noon, the day following Tir’s abduction from the Keep, that a mixed company of Guards and other Keep soldiery under command of Janus of Weg
finally reached the gorge where Rudy lay. Once it grew light enough to see, Gil climbed the rocks two or three times, snow still falling heavily, to lay out branches and rocks and to carve laborious notches with her footprints in the snow, showing where they were. She had just returned from gathering more wood when she heard voices on the rocks above. “Gaw, what a mess,” said the familiar back-country drawl of the Commander—and a heavenly choir of angels playing the back half of “Layla” on electrified harps couldn’t have been sweeter to her ears—“I thought you said you could chase the snow-clouds out onto the plain, me dumpling.”

  “They should have gone.” Brother Wend’s soft voice was puzzled. “It’s unheard of for weather to cling this long after the Summoner has departed. I think … I’m not sure, but I think there are spells of danger up ahead as well, avalanche and anger among the beasts of the mountains.”

  Janus cursed. “Bektis was never that strong,” he said. There was a scuffle, and a couple of little snow-slips tumbled down the rock face. Then Gil saw the black shapes of the Guards, and a couple of the white-clothed warriors of Lord Ankres’ company, scrambling down the way she had marked.

  Wend knelt beside Rudy and exclaimed in shock, pulling off his heavy gloves at once to weave spells of healing and stasis over the great burns and cuts on Rudy’s face and chest. Meanwhile, Janus and the others spread out along the frozen stream to cut saplings for a litter. The Icefalcon’s makeshift wall had served to keep the niche under the overhang warm through the night and into morning, but Rudy’s face wore the look of death. “Don’t die on me, man,” Gil whispered, in her disused English, as she watched the priest-wizard’s fingers trace again and again the lines of healing and strength over the still, hawk-nosed face.

  She’d have to face Alde, too.

  The Lady of the Keep awaited them on the shallow steps of the black fortress, wrapped thick in the faded rainbow of her coat of quilted silk scraps. Like a crooked scarecrow, the Bishop Maia of Renweth stood beside her, and on her other side her friend and maidservant Linnet unobtrusively held her hand. There were other people as well—the Keep Lords, and Ilae, and the entrepreneurs who functioned more or less as neighborhood bosses—but as she walked beside Rudy’s litter with the scrag-end of the storm winds lashing at her face, Alde was all Gil saw.