Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “O my brother,” she sighed, “there are always disasters. No, the people passed safely through the winter, save for the old men and the children, who died as old men and children always die. But with each death, Noon grieved. He was a man staked between two fires, my brother, glad that you lived and yet ashamed of that joy.”

  “I was not chosen,” the Icefalcon said stubbornly.

  “He thought you were.” She watched all around her as she spoke, aware of every circling hawk, every basking lizard, every bobbing blade of grass. The three horses moved within the aura of her spells and so were able to travel swiftly without much fear of being seen, but neither Cold Death nor the Icefalcon neglected the common cautions of travel in the Real World: covering their tracks, holding to the cliff walls, speaking in the soft-murmuring hunting voices in which all the children of the peoples of the north were raised. As the Icefalcon had seen in Sarda Pass, no matter how powerful a shaman one kept company with, there was always a stronger waiting somewhere.

  Her black eyes slid sidelong to him, and he could see reasons within reasons there, for asking what she asked.

  At length he said, “I could prove nothing. I didn’t know how it had been done. But Blue Child knew. And Blue Child was always my enemy, even before the death of Dove in the Sun at the Place of the Three Brown Dogs. The Dove perished through her own weakness, and no deed of mine could have saved her, but Blue Child blamed me for her death. And before that time, Blue Child always considered herself Noon’s successor. It was in her eyes, o my sister. You were gone at the time of the Summer Moot, or I would have sought you out. Indeed, I thought of doing so, only after the Summer Moot, Noon and Watches Water and all of the others pursued me, and I had to flee.”

  Still Cold Death said nothing, her small brown hands resting easy on her muscled thighs, speaking to her horse with her mind as Wise Ones did. Winds slewed and cried among the crossing watercourses, and the high hills cut off visibility, making the Icefalcon prickle with nervousness, as he did wherever he did not have a clear view of his surroundings.

  “I expected to be challenged at the Summer Moot,” he said. “I was a match for Blue Child’s strength even in those days, though she is nearly ten years older than I. Had she attacked me from ambush, or put poison in my food, or come on me when I slept, it would have been better than what she did. Not only did she cast me out of the people, o my sister, and not only did she rob me of the right to lead them, which Noon would have passed on to me. She made Noon the weapon of her will, an old man in the last summer of his strength. And he went to his death thinking me a coward and all his training of me gone to nothing. For that I will not forgive her.”

  Slunch grew thick on the hills to their right, the rubbery blanket of it slopping down into a small stream. From this a shambling band of bloated things toddled on swarms of wriggling legs. The Icefalcon’s horse—Scorpion Eater he was called—flung up its head and snorted, but Ashes, the mare Cold Death had ridden these many years, only snuffled disapprovingly. Like one of the Talking Stars People, she refused to be impressed by anything.

  Or perhaps, thought the Icefalcon, in these days such sights were common enough in the Real World.

  Rain swept over the country, a spring cloudburst common to those lands, though the Icefalcon had noted already that they were fewer than they had been twelve years ago. Resting under a hazel brake at the foot of a hill, the Icefalcon asked Cold Death to scry along his back trail, to Sarda Pass and the Keep, though he was almost certain no one had followed him over the pass. Clouds still sat on the mountain, livid below and blinding-white above, longer than the Icefalcon had ever known a Wise One to tie weather-spells in place. Cold Death broke off a blade of needlegrass and brushed it across the silver pool left in the old bison wallow and sat for a time with her brown legs drawn up, gazing into the sandy shallow.

  “The pass is thick with snow, o my brother.” She glanced at him under long straight eyelashes, like a thoughtful fox pup. “There are tracks of deer and rabbit in it, but the tracks of men always end in avalanche spills—one, two, three of them. Nor does anyone come on the road from the place west.”

  “I thought Bektis seemed calm about it,” remarked the Icefalcon. “There is a shaman in the Keep, an outlander named Rudy Solis, the son of alien stars. Can you reach him? Speak to him?”

  She repeated the name once or twice to herself as was the way of shamans, then brushed the water again with the grass: the Wise Ones of the Real World did not use crystals as civilized mages did, but rather things that came and went, like water and fire. Only among the Salt People did the shamans make elaborate mirrors of blood and obsidian glass.

  Water roared fresh in the stream they’d left, and wind still smelling of storm stirred the miscut crests and locks of her inky hair. Her face was like a child’s intent on a game. In time she shook her head. “He doesn’t reply.”

  “There is a woman named Ilae, then,” the Icefalcon said. “She has red hair and plays a deer-bone flute; she was born in Gettlesand in the Spring of Many Lemmings.”

  Cold Death went a third time to her gazing. The Icefalcon saw that she still bit her nails. His earliest recollections were of her, a tiny plump girl whom no one ever saw during the time of the summer hunts, such were the spells that she put on herself after their parents died. Black-haired children were frequently shunned in the Real World, and sometimes abandoned to die because they showed up against the dry prairie grass. Though Cold Death had cared for him diligently, still Noon and his wife had taken him into their household under the impression that Cold Death had disappeared, so unnoticeable had his older sister become.

  “Are you Ilae?” said Cold Death suddenly, speaking to the pool. “Wonderful! I am Cold Death, sister to the Icefalcon. Yes, he is here. He asks after the outlander Wise One Rudy Solis. She says he lives.” The last remark was addressed to the Icefalcon. “I love your hair—you really ought to braid it with blue penstemon, in a crown on top,” she added to Ilae in the pool. “It would look gorgeous. She says he is unconscious still.” She turned back to her brother.

  “He has been so ever since the Guards carried him in. It is all she can do, she says, to hold him in life until their eldest Wise One comes. He is on his way, she says, from the City of Walls.”

  “And does she have an explanation,” asked the Icefalcon sarcastically, “for the fact that no one has followed me over the pass to assist my rescue of Prince Tir? Should I perhaps give over the hunt and return to the Keep again, if the matter is of so little concern?”

  Cold Death conferred with her pool again. Ashes and the horse Scorpion Eater cropped the grasses around the thicket, while the third mount, Afraid of Flowers, who had followed at Cold Death’s bidding, grazed peacefully a little distance off, soft ears turning with the turning of the wind.

  “The Wise One Ilae says that no one followed after you because no one could, o my brother.” Cold Death raised her head to look at him, and she looked amused. “Every time parties seek to enter the pass there are avalanches, not just those few whose marks I saw. Moreover, the Keep is now surrounded by a lot of men in armor who came up from the valley below, black men and brown and golden. They sit in front of the gates of the Keep with all their weapons pointed at them, ready to slay the first person who opens those gates, and everyone within eats potatoes and complains about the smell of the sheep and shouts at one another over what ought to be done.”

  The Icefalcon stared at her as if she’d slapped him, and she grinned back like the demons that occasionally one saw in the coulees, the little ones that seemed mostly harmless. “Indeed I see them now, o my brother,” she said. “The smoke of their campfires hangs blue in the air and the glitter of their spears like stars in the turning light. Warriors of the Alketch lands, I think, like your Vair who rides north.”

  Her grin broadened, and she clicked her tongue softly, at which faint sound Scorpion Eater and Ashes trotted over to where she and the Icefalcon sat. “I do love coincidence, don’t
you?”

  “Show me one,” said the Icefalcon dryly, “and I’ll let you know.”

  The sun westered, stretching out their shadows on the grass. Bison raised their heads as they passed, curly-wooled black humps higher than a mounted man’s head, but clearly saw only other bison. In more than one place the Icefalcon saw signs of beasts not common to these lands twelve years before, rhinoceros and mammoth and the broad-horned elk of the Night River Country; the winds blew chill on his back.

  “The North has driven us out, o my brother.” Cold Death bent forward with the rhythm of her mare’s stride as they climbed from the coulee to the plain above. “Blue Child led us south from the winter steadings when the bison and the mammoth ceased to forage. There was an ice storm the winter after you left that killed all of Plum’s band, and another in the spring. Now the Ice in the North covers all the Night River Country down as far as the Ugly Hills. Everything is changed there.”

  The Icefalcon had heard this from Loses His Way—and a great deal about the grazing conditions around the Sea of Grass as well—but it still touched him with a finger of sorrow. Gil-Shalos sometimes talked about why this would be, a curious tale of the stars, and the sun’s heat failing, like other tales she told around the watchroom hearth fire, fascinating in spite of its illogic Everyone in the Real World had known for generations that the Ice in the North moved, though seldom so quickly.

  The Stars had told his Ancestors, years beyond years ago, Change is all that there is. Do not hold anything, for everything will go away in time. But he hadn’t thought of this in terms of the Night River Country. It was an uncomfortable reminder how far he had fallen short of the wisdom of his Ancestors—of the perfection for which he had always striven—to realize that despite all his upbringing he hadn’t quite thought of it in terms of Noon’s death.

  In a coulee still muddy from the rain they found the prints of horses, a war band a hundred and thirty-five strong, moving south ahead of them. “The Empty Lakes People,” said the Icefalcon, slipping from Scorpion Eater’s back to study the marks of the moccasin stitching and to note that Barking Dog, a minor warchief of that people, was still riding that long-tailed dun that overreached its own stride on the left side. Loses His Way had detailed to him a good deal about the pedigrees of that animal—whose name was Saber-tooth Horse—and most of the rest of the bloodlines of the herds of the Empty Lakes People, beasts inferior to the herds of the Talking Stars People, but some of the information was useful.

  He swung back up onto his mount, followed Cold Death down the wash. “Loses His Way and his party must have been scouting from the main hunt.”

  “More grief to them, then,” said Cold Death. “Here.” She nodded toward the ridge of hills before them, identical to all other ridges in these lands, a civilized person would have said. “From here we let the horses free and walk.”

  She slid from Ashes’ back and gave her round flank a smack. The mare—and the Icefalcon’s stallion—trotted off to join Afraid of Flowers. They wouldn’t go far.

  From the top of the rise they could see Vair na-Chandros and his party.

  It was a considerable train, especially in these times. Each of the twelve wagons was pulled by a team of mules. No wonder the Talking Stars People are interested, thought the Icefalcon. Remounts, relief teams, and a small herd of sheep followed, under a heavy walking guard; the sun glinted off their bowtips and spears. Vair na-Chandros himself rode up and down the length of the line on a black horse—the Icefalcon remembered that the man always chose blacks. He was helmed and armored as for war, a scarf of scarlet and blue wrapped over the spiked helm, and the silver hooks that had long ago replaced his severed right hand were concealed by the billowing cloak of white wool. He was much as the Icefalcon recalled him, elegant and dangerous to the soles of his gold-stamped boots, and the deep, hoarse bark of his voice brought back the cold wind under the Keep walls as the remnant of the armies of the Wathe trained with their flamethrowers for the assault on the Nest: the smell of the fog that last morning, assembling to march to the flooded ruin of Gae to meet the Dark.

  The shrieking of men in darkness as they were devoured.

  “Ninety-eight men,” remarked the Icefalcon, resting his chin on his hands and peering thoughtfully through the long stems of the needlegrass on the ridge. (The Talking Stars People did not deal in estimated numbers.) “And more than a thousand sent to besiege the Keep that they cannot hope to take. What is he hunting here?”

  Cold Death shook her head. Wind shimmered silver and dark in her wolf-hide tunic. “All I know is that I’ve tried to scry into that tall wagon there, the one with the guards walking on both sides, and cannot.”

  “Another Wise One?” The Icefalcon knew that the Wise could not scry one another. He didn’t like the idea of trying to get Tir away from two.

  “It could be. If so, it is a power I have never seen. Even in daylight I see around it a sicklied glow, like marshfire but dimmer.” She worked herself back down the slope until they could follow the ridgeline without being seen. They walked along the slope of the hill like the shadows of birds, paralleling the train. “You say that this Keep, this fortress, cannot be taken?”

  “It was built long ago by the Ancestors of the mud-diggers,” said the Icefalcon. “The Ancestors of the Wise Ones had devices of magic, as if Wise Ones themselves were made of crystal or gold, indestructible and able to be used like tools by other Wise Ones. Vair na-Chandros visited the Keep seven summers ago and knows there is no way for human armies to break its walls. Yet you tell me he has sent the greater part of his force east to do that very thing, and he is not a stupid man.”

  “He is if he thought a girl he wedded against her will would forget the experience when she came to womanhood.”

  There were times when Cold Death reminded him of Gil-Shalos. “He appears,” said the Icefalcon dryly, “to have been educated in that respect.”

  A few hours’ further travel brought them to rolling upland prairie, where the wagons formed a circle into which the cavvy was driven. The Icefalcon observed the guarded wagon carefully, but saw no sign of any Wise One riding within. The sheep were pastured nearby under heavy guard. Three riders went out with arrows and spears, circling upwind of a small cluster of bison grazing at the foot of one of the hills, riding like fools in a group. The Icefalcon, lying wolflike in the grass, shook his head and said, “Two arrows says they stampede them.”

  “I may be your sister, but I’m not a fool,” grinned Cold Death. “You keep your arrows, and I’ll keep mine. They’ve been trying to kill bison since they crossed Summer Water Creek. They’ll get deer, though, in the coulee, if the Empty Lakes People don’t ambush them there.”

  The coulee that wound away to the east, dotted thick with aspen and cottonwood, was the logical place for the Empty Lakes People to be camped. The Icefalcon said, “They won’t ambush the scouts. If it’s Barking Dog’s hunt, they’ll attack the camp at midnight.”

  “Only fools would try to attack them here,” protested Cold Death. Through the screening grasses Vair could be seen talking with one of his scouts, a thin young man with white hair done up in elaborate crests and braids, like an egret in mating time; the young man pointed back toward the hills. “Even without wizardries, the camp is on high ground with no cover around it.”

  “We’re talking about the Empty Lakes People. Two arrows.”

  “You’re prejudiced,” sniffed Cold Death. “On the other hand, it is the Empty Lakes People. I say dawn.”

  Despite the camp’s favorable position Vair na-Chandros seemed to share the Icefalcon’s apprehensions. The tracks of a hundred and thirty-five mounted warriors probably would have that effect, even if one didn’t know of Barking Dog’s proclivity for midnight raids. The men slung chains between the wagons and drove the sheep into the enclosure. From the eaves of every wagon roof, and on poles set around the perimeter of the camp, the expedition’s bald-shaved priest hung demon-scares of glass and beads, such as the Icef
alcon had seen on the waists and necks and house eaves of nearly everyone in the southern lands. Most of these amulets were of only limited efficacy—southerners being overly concerned with demons, which could, at most, frighten you in a dark place—but the Icefalcon had been aware all day of a faint nervous edginess, an awareness of being watched.

  From the slight rise where he and Cold Death lay, he observed the men as they erected a large square tent against the side of the biggest blue-roofed wagon. Still he saw nothing of any mage, or anything to tell him of Vair’s intent. “Do they seek to blot out light from within?” he breathed as they draped the tent inside and out with layer after layer of black cloth. “Will they drape their fires, too, that they be not seen?”

  The matter was overseen by a stocky white man, bald-shaved as Bektis’ clones and the priest were, but with a small trim fair mustache. He had the animal stride of one trained to fighting, and the Icefalcon recognized, when he took off his heavy leather jacket, the triple scarlet belt around his waist and chest that in the southern lands marked a professional Truth-Finder. He passed into the tent, and came out, and went in again. When he emerged a second time Vair crossed to him and spoke to him for some time, then gave instruction of some kind to a thin tall elderly man with long white mustaches, who seemed by the ribbons on his clothing and the gilded spikes of his helm to be his second in command.

  White Mustaches shook his head and shook his head again.

  Whatever it was that Vair willed him to do, after speaking to the Truth-Finder, at last he assented. As the men were building their cook fires and unrolling blankets the Icefalcon saw him going about the camp, pausing now by one warrior, now by another, speaking to them with his arm around their shoulders, nodding, his face grave. This Vair did, too.

  The bison at the foot of the hills duly stampeded into the distance. The hunters came back to camp with three deer. The sky turned a thousand livid shades of gold and salmon, mad ensanguined glories that had begun in the Year of Two Earthquakes, the year before the Summerless Year.