The younger woman’s jaw set, body stiffening, drawing in on itself for protection, when it was clear to her that Tir wasn’t among the returning Guards.
“Rudy’s alive,” Gil called, as they came near enough for her voice to be heard without shouting. “The Icefalcon’s gone after Bektis and Tir. Tir seems to be all right.”
“Thank you.” Gil could only guess at Alde’s reply by the movement of her lips. Wind lifted the Lady’s hair, a shroud of night, as she descended the steps to grasp and kiss Rudy’s nerveless hand.
Undemonstrative herself, Gil did the only thing she could think of to do to help her friend through the hours of the evening and the night. She stayed beside her in the cell to which they brought Rudy, a chamber in the Royal Sector whose round tiled heating stove and larger bed made it more comfortable than the young mage’s narrow quarters off the wizards’ workroom on first level south. Neither Ilae nor Wend had had early training in their craft, both having denied or neglected their talents in the days before the coming of the Dark Ones. But Wend had, through the years of his priesthood, practiced surreptitiously the healing magic on those members of the small western community who had been in his care, and both he and the red-haired girl had seven years of formal teaching. Together they worked spells of strength and stability on Rudy’s heart and nervous system, and of healing on his flesh, drew runes and circles of power around the herbs they prepared to combat infection.
Through the night Minalde stayed quietly in a corner of the room, fetching water or lint, feeding the fire or holding the knots on bandages when such things were called for. Linnet disappeared to look after Gisa, the daughter Alde had borne Rudy in the Summerless Year, who at eighteen months was old enough to know something was desperately wrong, and to care for Gil’s son Mithrys; Gil remained at Alde’s side. She didn’t say much—she had never known what to say to someone in grief or pain—but once Alde reached out and took her hand and squeezed it hard enough to hurt.
Later she asked, “Did you see Tir?” and Gil shook her head.
“I heard him call out Rudy’s name,” she said. In the soft double glow of lampflame and witchlight, Alde’s face seemed thin and old, an echo of the old woman she would one day be. A woman who had lost the husband she adored and feared and had seen the brother she had worshipped turn tyrant and monster, who had survived the crumbling of her world and found in its wreck a love like the rising of the stars.
“We saw his tracks a couple of times, when they let him off the donkey. I think that Hethya woman must have gotten him out of the Keep to look at the caves along the north side of the Vale, and Bektis put a glamour on one of those warriors he had with him to make Tir think it was Rudy.”
Alde only nodded, her face an ivory death mask.
“I never thought Bektis would possess the power to hold storms so long after he had gone.” Brother Wend turned on his three-legged stool, drying his hands on a coarse hempcloth towel, a dark-haired little man whose priestly tonsure had grown in when he left the Church, only to be replaced by his hairline’s early retreat. “Of course, he will always be a greater wizard than I, but …” He shook his head.
“He had a … a device of some kind,” said Gil. “This kind of crystal thing strapped on his hand. It may just have been reflection, but it looked like it lit up when Bektis threw lightning or defended himself against Rudy’s spells. He’s a stronger wizard than Rudy is anyway, but if it was a magnifier or amplifier of some kind …”
Ilae looked up from grinding dried purple-bead roots in the mortar. “Does such a thing exist?”
“Who knows?” Gil replied. “We don’t know what’s been stashed away all these years, left over from the Times Before. Ingold is always finding references to stuff the Church confiscated and hid and never talked about.”
“And with good reason, if legend is anything to go by.” Maia stood in the doorway, his long face lined with concern. “How is he?”
“About the same.” Gil shrugged, hiding fear and anxiety, as the Icefalcon did. “Maybe other people hid stuff, too, out of fear of the Church or of their neighbors. Now those places have been broken open, and nobody’s keeping an eye on them anymore.” She glanced sidelong at Maia. “Why do you think Ingold’s been in such a panic to find books and implements and whatever other apparatus he can?”
“There were certainly records in my episcopal palace of things I did not understand, hidden in places lost to anyone’s memory,” the tall Bishop agreed. “We do not even know what may still be hidden in this Keep, untouched since the Dark’s first rising.”
“And it’s a good guess Govannin had a couple of secrets on hand. For all she carried on about mages being soulless tools of Evil, she was quick enough to use black magic in anything she considered a good cause. If Bektis ever did manage to break her hold on him, you can bet your best fur booties he’d help himself to whatever he could stick in his pockets.”
“How soon will the storm clear?” Alde, who had sat all this while with bowed head in silence, now looked up at Wend. “How soon can a party go over the pass in pursuit?”
“I’ll go out there in the morning,” the physician promised. “Even the strongest spells disperse, if their maker is not there renewing them. I’m not the weather-witch Bektis is, but I should be able to hasten their breaking.”
“How soon?” Her eyes were like the heart of the night, her voice porcelain, cold and friable, as if it would shatter at a touch.
“Tomorrow afternoon?”
She whispered again, “Thank you.” Her small hands closed around Rudy’s brown, cold fingers, seeking reassurance, perhaps hoping to hold his spirit to his flesh. She hadn’t touched the tisane Linnet had brought, or the supper, either. Gil knew better than to think that she would unless forced.
I’d better get some sleep, thought Gil. And pack. She remembered the three identical warriors. Were others waiting to join Bektis once he got over the pass? A dozen or a hundred, cookie-cuttered out of some unguessable spell? Ingold had never mentioned such a thing to her, nor Bektis’ jeweled weapon, either.
How could she, and the Guards, and a novice like Wend cope with those and whatever else the sorcerer had up his fur-lined sleeves?
But the concern turned out to be moot. An hour or so later Ilae put down her herbs and sat up straight, her hand going to her temple, her eyes suddenly flaring wide. “Damn,” she said.
Alde, her hand still locked around Rudy’s where she sat on the floor, a pillow at her back, looked up sharply at the note in the girl’s voice. “What is it?”
“I …” Ilae hesitated, frowning, listening hard to sounds only she could hear. Then the witchlight brightened behind her head as she dug in the purse at her belt for a scrying stone, a ruby Ingold had found in the ruins of Penambra, which she turned and maneuvered in the sharp glint of the light. “Damn,” she said again, more forcefully, and pushed her rusty hair out of her eyes. “There’re men coming up the road from the river valley, my Lady. Lots of men—horses—spears glittering in the moonlight …”
“What?” Alde surged lithely to her feet, crossed the room in a flurry of petticoats, and looked over Ilae’s shoulder as if she too could see in the jewel. “Where?”
“They’ve just passed the wards we set up in the Arrow Gorge. Hundreds, it looks like. Carts and tents.” She looked up into the Lady’s face with baffled eyes. “It’s hard to see in darkness, but I think they’re black-faced, black-skinned, the men of the Alketch, and the brown men of the Delta Islands with gold beads in their hair. They’re coming fast.”
Alde cursed, something she seldom did. “Send for Janus,” she said. “We need to meet them at the Tall Gates and hold them there, if we can. Thank you, Ilae …”
Gil was already out of the room, striding down the Royal Way toward the Aisle and the lamplit watchroom of the Guards.
The Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched Bektis’ camp through the night, turn and turn about with hunting small game in the coulee. They worked mostl
y in businesslike silence, though Loses His Way asked about the conditions of grass on the eastern side of the mountains, and the movements of mammoth and bison herds, always a fruitful topic among the peoples of the Real World. He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most mud-diggers.
“It is very foolish not to know whether your horses are the sons and daughters of brave beasts or cowards,” he said gravely, stripping the skin from a woodchuck he had shot while Yellow-Eyed Dog slaveringly feigned disinterest. They sheltered in another bison wallow, not the one southeast of the hill but an older one to the southwest, full of curly buffalo grass and pennyroyal, with a good view over the broken lands to the south. “How can you know what they will do if you don’t know about their ancestors before them? These mud-diggers of yours want all the wrong things and don’t know what is important.”
“They are not my mud-diggers,” pointed out the Icefalcon. “And I have told them this many times.”
“Then why do you follow this shaman? This child is not your kin. He may even be your enemy.” He used the word dingyeh, “not-kin,” oktep in the tongue of the Talking Stars, and set the strips of woodchuck flesh over the hot coals of last night’s fire to roast.
“The child is …” The Icefalcon was silent a moment, trying to phrase his relationship to Eldor—and to the people in the Keep—in terms that could be understood in the Real World. There was much about his new life that he could not explain in terms of the old.
At length he said, “The child’s father helped me and gave me shelter when I departed from my own people.”
“Did you need shelter?” asked Loses His Way.
“No. But for his sake I would not like to see the boy come to harm. What troubles me now is that Bektis must be watching his back trail …”
And then they were no longer two, but three. The Icefalcon couldn’t even tell how long she’d been there.
She was a diminutive woman, with the black hair that sometimes marked Wise Ones in the Real World. From babyhood her parents had shaved it off, so she had never learned to regard it. It was hacked off short now, straight as water and heavy as the hand of fate. When the Icefalcon had seen her last, it had not yet been touched by gray. Her eyes were black, too.
“Little brother,” she said.
“Elder sister.” He inclined his head. “You know Loses His Way, our enemy from the Empty Lakes People.”
She nodded. Everyone in the Real World knew everyone else, pretty much, or at least knew of them.
“It pleases me to see that you were not devoured by the Eaters in the Night, o my sister. I had heard that they singled out the Wise.”
She smiled, small but very bright, like a star. “Then I suppose I am not all that Wise.” She picked a pink-edged flower of bindweed and turned it in her fingers, smiling at the silkiness of the petals under her touch. “Do they still haunt the lands east of the wall of snows, little brother?”
He shook his head. “At the end of that first winter a Wise One there sent them away to the other side of Night, where no people live and it is night forever. They have not returned again.”
“Good,” said Cold Death briskly and worked the flower into the end of the Icefalcon’s braid among the bones. “I thought it must have been something of the kind. Now who is this Bektis, and why does it concern you that he watches his back trail?” She sat down cross-legged between them and picked the woodchuck’s heart out of the coals, devouring it with an expression of ecstasy. “Was it he who slew five of the Empty Lakes People and put their bodies in the coulee, or was that you, little brother?”
“It was Bektis,” the Icefalcon said a little grumpily because he loved woodchuck hearts with a great, strong love. “And those with him.” He gave her a quick summary of the events of the past four days, finishing with “He is a fool, but not so much a fool that he would not watch his back trail, knowing that he was observed in carrying the boy away. He knows that the warriors of the Keep will bear stronger amulets against his spells of battle illusion and battle panic than the warriors of the Empty Lakes People, whose shaman Walking Eyes was killed by the Eaters seven years ago, yet he displays no concern over the matter. He waits here for something.”
Cold Death tousled the dog’s ruff. “For the rest of the black warriors,” she said. The dog sniffed at her and licked her hand.
“T’cha!” scolded Loses His Way amiably. “You kiss your people’s enemies, o my brother?”
“He tastes her that he may devour her later,” explained the Icefalcon, and the warchief nodded.
“Very well, then.”
“Ninety-eight of them are a day south of here,” Cold Death went on. “Tonight you’ll be able to see their fires. As for why he shows no concern about pursuit …”
She frowned. She had sharp little flecks of brow, pulling together over a short snub nose.
“There is power in that band,” she said. “They have twelve wagons covered in blue canvas, and surrounding them … not darkness, but a movement that bends the shape of the air.” She shook her head and tried to shape some kind of meaning with her square brown short-fingered hand. “There is evil in them, such as I have never before seen. Demons follow them, and the elementals of water and air and earth. Blue Child follows these warriors and their wagons at a distance.”
“And does the Blue Child,” asked the Icefalcon softly, “ride these lands?”
“These lands are ours,” said Cold Death. “Unto the Night River Country and down to the Bones of God.”
Loses His Way hackled like a wolf at the suggestion that the larger portion of the Real World did not in fact belong to the Empty Lakes People, but Cold Death continued unconcernedly, picking another flower. “It was Blue Child who sent me scouting, to see who or what awaited this dark captain, with the hook for his hand, at Bison Hill.”
Bison Hill was the only place the mud-diggers used for meetings, the only landmark large enough to catch their blunted attention. The Icefalcon only asked, “A hook?”
Vair na-Chandros, he thought. It had to be.
“A big man with hair that curls like that of a bison’s hump, gray with age, not white in youth as many of the black warriors. His eyes are yellow and his voice like dirt in a tin pot. He has a silver hook in place of his right hand, and his men call him Lord. You know this man?”
“I know him.” The Icefalcon’s face was impassive as he turned the woodchuck meat on the flat rocks among the coals. “In the days of the Dark Ones, this hook-handed one commanded the forces of the Alketch that came to help humankind against the Dark. He abandoned them in the burning Nests that he might preserve his own followers when he went to war in the Alketch. After that I am told he tried to make himself Emperor of the South by wedding the old Emperor’s daughter against her will. Now he rides north, does he, with less than six score men, and wagons filled with uncanny things?”
He sat up a little and gazed south across the broken lands, green miles of chilly springtime where a red-tailed hawk circled lazily and a couple of uintatheria, ungainly moving mountains with their tusked and plated heads swinging back and forth, ambled from one gully to another in their eternal quest for fresh leaves.
But what he saw was the rainbow figure descending the steps of the Keep in the mists and the hatred in those fox-gold eyes when they looked on Ingold Inglorion. He saw too the upraised hooks, scarlet with firelight, summoning back his troops out of the darkness of the burning Nests. Saw Ingold—and hundreds of others—engulfed and borne away by the Dark.
It came back to him also what Gil-Shalos had told him about the Emperor’s daughter of the South.
“I like this not, o my sister,” he said at last. “This Vair is an evil man, and now you tell me he rides with an evil magic in his train. Whether this be a mage or
a talisman or an object of power, I would feel better if I knew something more of his intent, before he takes the boy into his grasp. Will you remain here, my enemy, and look out for the boy? If they await Vair’s coming, having brought Tir this distance, he should be safe enough.”
“I will abide,” said the warchief. “He owes me somewhat, this Wise One.”
“Good.” The Icefalcon rose. “Then let us ride, o my sister,” he said.
Bright against the green-black trees, a red scarf flashed, slashing to and fro.
“They’re in sight,” said Melantrys of the Guards.
As when wind passes over a standing grove, with a single movement the men and women on the north watch-tower bent their bows, hooked the strings into place. Another movement—another wind gust—the soft deadly clattering of arrow shafts. The same wind moved Gil, automatic now but still rich with heightened sensation in her mind and heart: the spiny rough feathers, the waxy smoothness of horsehair and yew. From the watchtower’s foot the narrow road led down to the Arrow River Gorge, champagne-pale between clustering walls of mingled green: fir, hawthorn, hazel, fern.
Rustling muttered above the breeze shift of the trees. Sharp as the red arbutus in the ditches came the whinny of horses.
“The fat bleedin’ shame of it,” sighed Caldern, a north-country man so big he looked like a thunderstorm in his black Guards tunic and coat. “Whatever you do, lassie, don’t kill the horses. We can aye use ’em.”
Rishyu Hetakebnion, Lord Ankres’ youngest son, whispered to Gil, “Do you think we’ll turn them back?” He’d spent hours dressing and braiding his hair for this occasion. He hadn’t liked being put in the north tower company as a common archer, but his father had insisted upon it: If you’re going to give commands one day you must first learn how to obey them.
Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) Page 9