Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  Gil had explained to the Icefalcon that the colors of the sky had to do with the world growing colder and the movement of the Ice in the North, and why there had been no summer the year before last, but her explanation had left the Icefalcon with little more than a conviction that the Ancestors in charge of the sky had inexplicably become fond of reds and golds. As for the Ice in the North, it had always moved a few feet, sometimes many yards, a year. What was the point of telling over the memories of one’s Ancestors, if not to know things like that?

  Darkness came. The men in the camp were experienced in warfare and stayed away from the fires themselves, even with the winds that quested the prairie like hungry ghosts. The Icefalcon saw them glance, every now and then, at the square black tent against the side of the tall wagon, from which no light issued. Sometimes after so doing a soldier would make a sign of blessing in the air.

  In the coulee the brush flickered in little stirrings against the flow of the wind. Something like smoke curled close to the earth among the cottonwoods, and above the glitter of the water there, but when one looked at it straight there was nothing.

  A crack of saffron showed where the tent flap and inner curtains were raised. The reflections sparked a hundred answering notes of light from the demon-scares on poles and wagon eaves and from the eyes of the men on guard.

  White Mustaches stepped forth. He stretched out his hand to one of the men to whom he had spoken at the setting of the camp, sitting by the fire among his friends, and somehow the Icefalcon was reminded of Noon, coming out of the dark with the white shell in his hand.

  “They don’t like it,” whispered Cold Death. “Watch them.”

  Mageborn, she could see better in the dark than he, but creeping to a higher vantage point in the windy desolation the Icefalcon saw indeed how the warriors within the wagon circle fidgeted and looked about them and muttered to one another. Not one slept. Those not on guard sat up in their blankets, or kept two and three together as close to the fires as they dared. Though they played at sticks—a game even more simple-minded than the dicing that went on incessantly in the Guards’ watchroom—it was clear none of them gave much attention to the proceedings. The Icefalcon experienced a momentary regret that he could not slip into the camp and set up a high-stakes game.

  The moon rose late, meager as a sickly infant like to die; the muzzy stars watched through slitted yellow eyes. Between the second and the third hours of the night came the screaming.

  The Icefalcon had seldom heard worse, even during the Long Sacrifice.

  “Skinning?” he whispered to Cold Death.

  “Sounds like it.”

  Pressed to the earth among the grass roots, he and Cold Death bellied as close to the camp as they dared. Something moved behind them in the darkness, a wisp of brightness glimpsed from the corner of his eye. When he turned it was gone—or had never been—but a few moments later the grass bowed in the starlight where no wind touched.

  Demons.

  The scream changed. The Truth-Finder must have tightened the screw on the gag.

  “Is that how they sacrifice among the mud-diggers?” Cold Death wanted to know.

  The Icefalcon shook his head. Out of academic curiosity he listened more closely, trying to sift sound from sound in the shuffle of hushed camp noise, but could hear nothing now from the black tent. “The Truth-Finders work for men, not in the service of the Ancestors,” he said. “The mud-diggers call their Ancestors ‘saints,’ and in the South they sacrifice to them by dedicating gladiators to their names, making them kill one another and letting these ‘saints’ of theirs choose whom they will take and whom they will spare. In the North, in the Keep of Dare, they only promise the ‘saints’ things, like money or certain acts.”

  “But why would their Ancestors want things?” asked Cold Death. “They’re dead. And why would they care what their children do?”

  The Icefalcon shrugged. “Their priests explained this to me, but it made no sense. There are those who will kill a goat, or a pair of pigeons, to these saints, but this they do secretly, and in the North not at all anymore, pigeons being hard to come by now. When I was in the South, I heard of those who killed human beings to appease demons or to bribe them for favors.”

  “You can’t get favors from demons.” Cold Death glanced over her shoulder, to where something riffled suddenly at the water down in the coulee, as if a thousand fish had all snapped at once. “They’re bodiless, and you’d have to be a complete fool to trust them.”

  “People in the South are fools.” The Icefalcon shrugged again. “Most people are, if they think they’ll get their own wills.”

  The bright line slit the night again, a red malignant grin. Vair na-Chandros emerged, leading by the arm a man who walked uncertainly, like one whose legs trembled, but the Icefalcon was almost certain, as they passed the fire, that it was the first warrior who had gone into the tent. Almost certain because the man was bald now and without the mustaches that he had worn. Vair’s arm was around the man’s shoulders, and though no words could be distinguished the tone of his harsh voice was soothing and kind. As far as the Icefalcon could tell the man made no reply.

  Together they came toward the guard who stood just outside the ring of the wagons, within a dozen yards of the Icefalcon and his sister. “Drann,” said Vair, greeting the man on guard; he went on in the ha’al tongue of the South, which the Icefalcon knew slightly, patting the man he led on the shoulder as he transferred the guard post from one to the other, then taking Drann by the arm. Drann looked back at the new guard and seemed to hesitate as Vair led him back across the camp to the black tent.

  A finger of outstreaming light, and the silhouetted shape of the Truth-Finder inside. Then darkness.

  There was no further outcry, but when the wind shifted the Icefalcon smelled blood.

  The Empty Lakes People attacked at dawn. Halfway between midnight and morning the Icefalcon resigned himself to the fact that Cold Death was going to win two arrows from him. But then, he had never been able to win a bet with his sister.

  The first he heard was an outcry among the mules, and the hard steely whap of the southern recurve bows, then shouting. He and Cold Death had moved two or three times during the night and were stationed now in a thicket of rabbitbrush between the camp and the first of the rolling hills. They saw men running and struggling amid a tangle of mules, horses, and sheep within the circle of the wagons. Animals leaped over and crashed into the chain barricades, driven by howling war-dogs. Then the bulk of Barking Dog’s riders swept up out of the coulee, striking like a spearhead at the wagons.

  Arrows poured from behind the wagons. Riders plunged out, mounted and ready, dozens of them, old White Mustaches leading with curved sword upraised. When the warriors of the Empty Lakes came near to the wagons, men rushed from the cover of the heavy wooden wagon-boxes, swords flashing, Vair at their head, urging them on. Twenty, thirty, forty men …

  “Where were they hiding all night?” demanded the Icefalcon, startled. There were close to a hundred and fifty of the Alketch warriors, outnumbering their attackers where they had been outnumbered when the sun went down.

  Equally nonplussed, Cold Death shook her head.

  They were there, however, and when swords began to cleave and men to struggle hand to hand, it was clear they were no Wise One’s illusion. After pushing back the initial charge they held their position between the wagons, refusing to be drawn out, striking only when the Empty Lakes People rode close enough to be hit. The Alketch riders wheeled their horses, driving the attackers toward the spears. The Empty Lakes People promptly scattered in all directions for the hills. One nearly rode over the two watchers in their rabbitbrush blind.

  “Can he make men from air?” the Icefalcon whispered. He saw enemies he knew—Gray Mammoth, Herd of Wild Pigs, Long-Flying Bird, and others—fall bleeding in the long grass. Saw, too, the sudden thrashing of the grass near the dying and the spots of trailed gore all around the bodies that spoke o
f demons.

  “It seems he can,” said Cold Death, bemused.

  Not something that boded particularly well, thought the Icefalcon, for those under siege in the Keep of Dare.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “She says she has never heard of such a thing in her life.”

  The Icefalcon sniffed. It was true that Ilae’s life had not so far been very long, but it was true also that Thoth Serpent-mage had taught her for five years in the half-ruined Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand, where most of the world’s few remaining wizards now dwelled. It was also true that she was Ingold Inglorion’s student now.

  “Ask her how it fares with the siege.”

  Over the wide plains the sun stood a few fingers above the mountains. Wood smoke gritted on the air, and the smell of corn porridge. The elementals of earth and water that oozed forth at the stench of blood and pain had sunk away into their native stone and streams, and the demons faded into the bright air. The Icefalcon guessed they had not gone far. Could Cold Death see them, he wondered, as the great shamans could?

  “It fares well, she says.” A little frown puckered between Cold Death’s sparse brows. “She says the southern warriors have not even essayed to break the Doors.”

  “Have they not?” The Icefalcon settled his back to one of the rocks among which they crouched, down in the coulee where the night lingered blue, and folded his long arms about his drawn-up knees.

  He felt no surprise.

  The merchant came to mind, the brown-faced southerner who had claimed to be from Penambra, the man who had told Ingold about the cache of books in the villa in Gae. He had spoken the name of Harilómne the Heretic. And Ingold had gone.

  It didn’t take a Wise One or a scrying glass to deduce that the man had been dispatched by Vair.

  Overhead, vultures made a slow silent pinwheel above the bodies of the slain.

  The Icefalcon plucked a little dried venison from his bag and chewed it thoughtfully. “How fares Rudy Solis?”

  Cold Death relayed the query to Ilae. The Icefalcon imagined Ilae herself, sitting in all probability in the long double cell the wizards used as a workroom, with its battered table of waxed oak and its great cupboards filled with scrolls, tablets, books salvaged from every library and villa they could get to, from the western ocean to the Felwoods. Rank after polyhedronal rank of record crystals glittered frostily on shelves, the images of the Times Before for all those who could read them. He wondered if Gil would be there, too, studying the crystals by means of the black stone scrying table in the corner, seeing in it the faces of the mages who by their spells and arcane machinery had raised the Keeps against the first incursion of the Dark.

  Single-minded and essentially lazy—for it was reasonable to rest and conserve energy when not either in an emergency or preparing for one—the Icefalcon regarded Gil’s obsessive studies with some bemusement. She had for years now been piecing together histories, both of the three and a half millennia that had transpired between the first arising of the Dark and the second, and of the Times Before, trying to learn what she could of the world the Dark had long ago destroyed. This she did, she told him, as he would have sought knowledge of a trail long cold, by scratches on rocks or seeds in crumbling dung. That she would or could do so while maintaining the brutal training required of the Guards and caring for a son now able to toddle purposefully in the direction of anything that could conceivably be complicated was, to the Icefalcon, merely an example of the alienness of her nature.

  “She says he still lies unconscious.” Cold Death’s sweet murmur brought him from his thoughts. She held out her hand and he passed her the leathern tube—Cold Death was much enamored of venison sweetened with maple sugar. “The Lady Alde tends him, she says, and has not slept. She is much distressed.”

  “The child Tir is her son.”

  A shift in the voices of the men, the doleful complaint of mules, snagged his attention, and he swung up the stones of the low cliff until he could just put his head over the grass on the rim. But it was only breakfast ready, not breaking camp just yet. They were lazy as bears in summer, these southerners. Some of the men gathered around the cook fires, holding out wooden plates and bowls made of gourds. Their heads were bald as new-birthed babies, their feet not clad in boots but, like the feet of Bektis’ three clone warriors, wrapped in rawhide.

  It was too far to distinguish clearly, but he thought they were all of the same height, the same build.

  In the morning stillness the walls of the black tent hung straight, seeming to absorb the light of the pallid sun. The demon-scares flashed on their poles like the corpses of crystal insects, sinister and bright.

  He slipped down the rocks to Cold Death once again. “Can you speak with the Wise One Ingold Inglorion?” he asked. “He was once called Olthas Inhathos, the Desert Walker, among the White Lakes People.”

  “Ah,” said Cold Death softly, and smiled. She licked the venison grease from her fingers and plucked another grass blade, which she passed over the tiny pool in the rocks, no more than a cupped handful and frozen with last night’s cold, and considered it with bright-black prairie-dog eyes.

  “Olthas Inhathos,” she said. “Desert Walker. You do not remember me, but …”

  And she smiled at whatever it was that the Desert Walker replied.

  “Even so,” she said. “I am in the badlands a day’s ride south of Bison Hill with my brother Nyagchilios, the Pilgrim of the Skies, the Icefalcon of the Talking Stars People. The hook-handed bad man Vair na-Chandros is here … No, not with me but camped close by, and it appears that he can make warriors out of air. It is he who sent the army against the Keep in Renweth Vale, we think. He also—so my brother says—sent out the peddler whose story took you to Gae, that Bektis could enter the Keep undetected to steal the child Tir.”

  Her smile widened with delight, and to the Icefalcon she said, “The Desert Walker learned to curse from the Gettlesand cowboys, I think. My little brother is confused,” she went on, turning back to the puddle of ice, “and does not know what to do.”

  “I never said so,” the Icefalcon said frostily. Sisters. “Tell him of the black tent and the things that passed in the night.”

  While she did so he climbed the rocks again to watch the movements of the camp.

  Under ordinary circumstances the Icefalcon would have felt no hesitation about his ability to creep into the camp itself, even by daylight. But the magic that hung so patently about the walls of that square black tent kept him at a distance. Among his people there was a story about a coyote who went hunting with a saber-tooth and feasted in the end not only on the eggs of the horrible-bird while it was busy killing the saber-tooth—who after the fashion of such creatures didn’t wait to see if there was unseen danger nearby before closing in—but on the entrails of the larger and more hasty beast itself.

  “He is troubled, your Desert Walker,” Cold Death said when the Icefalcon eased himself down into the crevice again. “He says he will make for the Keep with all speed. In the meantime he begs you, guard the boy Tir.”

  “And what of the black tent?”

  “He says there is a tale about an old woman who wrought warriors out of bread dough and brought them to life with the blood from her left little finger, but he does not think this is the case. He says the Guild of Bakers would never stand for such a thing. He says he will meditate.” She handed him back the bag.

  “Thank him for me,” retorted the Icefalcon, exasperated, and slung the bag over his shoulder again.

  “Our enemy Loses His Way abides still by Bison Hill.” Cold Death stood and tossed her grass blade aside. “He seems at peace, so I can assume that you were right, that the shaman Bektis awaits the coming of this Vair and will do naught to the boy in the meantime. Will you return thence now, little brother?”

  “No.” The Icefalcon looked around him, gauging the defensibility of the coulee. A water cut led from the main stream to their left, and having hunted here once in the past he knew th
ere was a sort of cave under its bank a mile and a half upstream, hidden by chokecherry brambles.

  “I have watched and seen no sign of another shaman,” he said quietly. “Yet Vair himself is not mageborn, and there is power of some kind there. Ingold and Minalde need to know of it before Vair achieves his meeting with Bektis. Things may change after that, for better or for worse.” He unfolded his lean height—Cold Death didn’t even top his shoulder—and sniffed wind and weather, listening to the voices of the camp and the sounds made by the vultures and the kites.

  “If there is some magic there that demands sacrifices of pain, I think I had best know this, too, before they take possession of the child Tir.”

  Cold Death’s face sobered, and she nodded.

  “Can you work on me a spell of shadow-walking?”

  Her mouth was still, but her dark eyes flickered to the brightening sky.

  “I know. I have heard the Wise Ones of the Keep, Ilae and Ingold and Rudy, speak of such spells. They are more difficult to perform by daylight, but daylight would render me less easy to detect, as it does demons. I can sleep in the cave there, if you will weave the spells around me and stand guard above my body.”

  Still she was silent. He saw the concern for him in her eyes.

  “I need to know,” he said, speaking to her now not as his sister but as a shaman. “We all need to know. And I could not protect you while you slept.”

  “Even so,” she said, and sighed, knowing he spoke truth. “But if it is a demon in the camp that they have summoned …”

  “Whatever is there, it is no demon.” He gestured to the amulets, like unholy fruit glittering in the new light. “And if there are ward-spells in the camp, or some other form of spirit power that will tell them of my presence, the best time for me to enter is while they are breaking camp.”

  She spread her hands palm out in surrender. “So be it, then,” she said. “Come.”