Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  A canopy of three linked half arches surmounted it, intertwined metal and glass—two men were taking them down now. They wore boots and moved with more intelligence and purpose than did the clones, and packed the apparatus carefully into great wooden crates, stuffing in wadding of dry grass, wool, crumpled parchments, and rags of linen and rawhide. At their apex the arches had been joined by a many-sided obsidian polyhedron and linked down their sides with dangling nets of what appeared to be meshed gold wire, worn thin and tattered, and woven with more spheres of glass and amber. Two more polyhedrons, glass or crystal, tentacled in gold tubes and set on wooden plinths—the plinths were raw-new—stood at the opposite end of the tub. One of the booted warriors boxed them up as the Icefalcon watched.

  To the Icefalcon’s spirit sight, the whole of the apparatus shimmered with magic, and he understood why Cold Death spoke of it with uneasiness and fear.

  There were petcocks and drains on the vat, and the straw underneath them, sodden and stinking, was being cleared away. Sockets, too, made dark little mouths in the corners of the vat to accommodate what looked like poles with ingeniously geared crank-wheels, but these had already been dismantled. Where had they gotten all of this? the Icefalcon wondered. And how had it survived the centuries—decades of centuries, Gil said—since the Times Before?

  Hidden away, as Gil and Maia had said?

  It looked built to last, like all the possessions of the mud-diggers, who could not abide the thought of anything they owned passing into dust.

  In the lower part of the tent, on the straw and rough carpets of the floor, the Truth-Finder was packing up a little box. Coming near, the Icefalcon saw that it contained needles made of crystal, dozens of them, each with a bead on its head: amber, iron, crystal, black stone.

  White Mustaches, whom Vair greeted as Nargois, came into the tent and asked a question in which the Icefalcon recognized the words for corpses—only Vair used the word carcasses, the bodies of animals—and barbarians. Nargois assented, and Vair seemed pleased.

  Nargois asked something about the Keep of Dare, and Vair shrugged as he replied. Though he knew of it—how not?—the siege was clearly not a matter that deeply concerned him.

  Eleven hundred men? Why not?

  Blood-stench, magic, cold, and pain twisting at his mind, the Icefalcon left the tent. He saw no reason why he could not go directly through the walls, and he was right: the scrape and itch of every layer of the cheap black cloth and canvas, darkness, then the bright dry sunlight of the plains morning. He investigated the other wagons as the men loaded them. Most contained food; one held weapons. Two were packed with clothing, heavy furs and densely quilted jackets in addition to the loose, bright-hued hand-me-down trousers and tunics worn by most of the men.

  In another wagon he found crates of the type he had seen in the tent: heavy wood, draped with demon-scares, and dimly glowing with the sickish pale light that played around the apparatus in the tent. Some other apparatus, clearly. May their Ancestors protect the folk of the Keep if it prove as evil.

  But, of course, he thought, the Ancestors of the Keep folk could not protect them. The protection lay only in Tir’s memories—and it was the Icefalcon’s failure that had separated Tir from them.

  Outside, men were taking down the demon-scares from their poles, the last thing done before moving on. One or two pocketed them if they thought they were unobserved. It was an easy matter for the Icefalcon to leave the camp.

  So Vair had machinery from the Times Before.

  And a woman who claimed to be possessed of a spirit from those times, though Gil, who was wise in many matters, considered her a fraud.

  From a rise in the windswept lands, the Icefalcon watched the caravan draw away. The snapping of whips, harness leather creaking, and the ceaseless bleat of sheep pierced him, musical as the light and the smells and the terror of the demons who now, he saw, materialized from the air and drifted after the wagons like thinly glowing sharks. The cold had grown on him, crippling and exhausting, drawing him toward the unfulfilled promise of the sun’s ascending disk.

  Slowly he let himself drift upward, until he hung like his namesake hawk far above the smooth curves of the land. His sight could follow the trace of the trail, a grass-filled groove paler than the surrounding hills, all the way to the dark tuft of Bison Hill in the distance. In the other direction that pale groove drove south, arrow-straight, the scuffed smudges like footprints marking Vair’s previous camps. Every draw and wash and coulee formed serpentine patterns of red and sepia, silver agonizingly bright through the dust-green cottonwood and sedge. He could see the rabbits in the brush, the fishlike glowing sinuosity of water elementals in the stream. He was aware of the Empty Lakes People, riding in all directions still, scattered and broken after their defeat and going back to their hunting trails, telling themselves they were fools who followed fools when mammoth and uintatheria roved the draws.

  And below him, on the flank of one rolling hill, he saw a single rider, sitting a single gray horse.

  She watched the wagons also, no expression on her fire-scarred face. A big woman, rawboned and heavy-muscled, shoulders as wide as a man’s under a tunic of wolfskin, a shirt of mammoth wool she’d woven herself on a walking-loom, for who can trust another’s luck and goodwill in something that will abide against one’s skin? Somehow he could recognize her, as even from this height he could count the black spots on prairie hens. A harsh face, with mocking pale eyes, framed in hair that was white where the fire scars ran up under it. She sat at ease, her hands resting on her thighs, and when next the Icefalcon looked she was gone.

  Blue Child.

  Lover of Dove in the Sun, who had died on a hunting raid under his command.

  Usurper of his birthright, who had branded him a coward and pulled darkness over the last year of old Noon’s life.

  Engineer of a hoax upon their mutual Ancestors that could have cost all the people dearly through the winter.

  And warchief of the Talking Stars People.

  Some day, thought the Icefalcon, and I think the day will be soon, there will be a reckoning between us.

  The sun called to him, climbing in its splendor at noon. But the air seethed with demons, smoky forms invisible in the dazzle, and he would be a fool, he thought, to challenge them. So he sought the earth again, and the warm cave under the cut bank, where Cold Death sat beside his body, murmuring spells to keep demons and death at bay.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Any change?”

  Minalde shook her head. “I tell myself it’s better that way,” she whispered, though Gil suspected, looking down at the still bronze face of the man on the bed, that Rudy was beyond being waked. A single pine knot burning in an iron holder smeared gritty yellow light on the younger woman’s features. With no guarantee how long the siege would last, use of torches and pine knots was kept to a minimum.

  There was no need for more light in this room anyway. Ilae came in several times a day to check on her patient and renew the spells of healing, the spells of warmth that kept him from sinking into cold and death, but as a mage she could see in the dark. When Alde sat here, as she came in many times a day to do, she needed no more light than the single lamp could provide.

  Even by its forgiving radiance she looked horrible, wasted and white and beaten. Gil knew she kept up a good face where others could see her. In the Keep they called her brave. Here she wept.

  Rudy had been Gil’s friend for seven years, since their first unfortunate meeting in the California hills. He was the final link that held her to the world they both had abandoned, the world neither ever quite forgot. She had shed tears in this room herself.

  “Look, I hate to bug you about this,” she said, “but Lord Sketh will die of grief if he doesn’t see you. I can tell him to get lost if you want.”

  Minalde shook her head and squeezed out the rag that lay soaking in a bowl of scented vinegar water to wipe down her face. “I’ll have to eventually,” she said. “My old
nurse always told me, ‘There’s no sense putting off.’ ” She got up. When she was working—meeting with the Keep Lords, hearing the endless squabbles and quibbles that the Keep dwellers brought to her for justice, conferring with the hunters and the wardens of the hydroponics gardens about the division of food and labor—she dressed in one of several formal gowns, cut and styled after the fashion they had learned in the days of the Realm’s strength to associate with dignity and authority. She was so dressed now: train, flowing sleeves, lavish embroidered trapunto- and jewel-work patterns, though few people in the Keep knew that she took delight in making the gowns herself. The green wool looked muddy by the smoky light, the red velvet of the pillows behind her like old blood.

  “We might as well get it over with.” Alde readjusted the elaborate braids of her coiffure, pinned over them the veil that had been part of her trousseau, pale-green silk that fell past her hips. “I know what Lady Sketh wants.”

  Generally when Lord Sketh asked for an audience it was Lady Sketh’s idea.

  “We haven’t even asked their intention,” declared the tall, pear-shaped man, folding his hands before the worked silver buckle of his belt. “We’ve made ourselves prisoners here, living like jailbirds, for nearly a week now, when the matter may be one that can be adjusted by compromise.”

  “Two siege engines,” Minalde pointed out in her low sweet voice, “and eleven hundred men marching fully armed up the pass does not bear the appearance of compromise to me.” In the cool white splendor of the glowstones that hung from wire baskets in her small conference room, she looked worse, thin and stretched, dark smudges under her eyes. “Had they wished to parley at any time in the past week, a man could have come to the steps of the Keep and knocked on the doors. Ilae?”

  She turned to the wizard in the low chair to her left. Ilae looked older, and more queenly, with her red hair braided up into a crown on her head. Maia, erstwhile Bishop of Penambra and now head of the Church in the Keep, sat at Alde’s right, the position of honor. Minalde had embroidered his formal tabard, too, as a gift on his forty-second birthday last year. The carved black chair in which Tir usually sat during his mother’s audiences had been taken away.

  “In my scrying crystal I see them, my Lady,” said the girl, and touched the ruby tucked in the palm of her left hand. “Men with drawn swords stand guard on either side of the Keep doors. Master Wend tells me there’ve been fights, too, ’twixt their men and Yar’s archers, and yestere’en they tried to ambush those as had tried again to get through the pass.”

  “Well, naturally there’s been fighting,” said Enas Barrelstave, who had accompanied Lord Sketh to his audience. Barrelstave was one of the wealthiest commoners in the Keep, and something of a demagogue as well. “We meet them with a rain of arrows; our hunters are shooting at whoever gets too far from the main camp. We assumed from the beginning that their intentions were ill.” He glanced accusingly at Janus, on one side of the door that led to Alde’s private chambers. Gil guarded the other, their black surcoats a silent reminder of the Guards’ support. “Of course they’re expecting more trouble.”

  “The least you can do, my Lady,” said Sketh, “is arrange a parley.”

  “No.”

  “May I remind your Ladyship,” said Barrelstave, “with all due respect, that perhaps his young Lordship might have a different opinion were he here to disagree?”

  Cheap shot, thought Gil, angry at the not too tactful reminder that Minalde, as regent for Tir, was now nothing more than the widow of the last King, seven years dead. Without Tir, her official position was considerably weakened. I’ll remember that later, pal.

  Alde’s jaw tightened for a moment, then she said in a pleasant, conversational tone, “Very well. Would you, Lord Sketh, or you, Master Barrelstave, like to be the one who goes outside?”

  The two men looked at each other, having quite clearly envisioned someone of lesser status in the role of messenger. Still, Gil had to give them credit: faced with Put up or shut up, both volunteered, and Lord Sketh, who knew some of the ha’al tongue, was given the job.

  Janus picked Melantrys as Doorkeeper for the operation. She could catch flies in her hands and had been shot at enough by bandits that whizzing arrows wouldn’t bother her. Gil, Minalde, and Ilae stood just inside the inner set of Keep Doors, backed up by a sizable contingent of Guards, swords drawn and ready. Ilae wrought two small fire-spells, placing them just between the armed warriors standing at the outer Doors—not easy to do, working at a distance with a scrying stone. The Alketch guards clearly knew there were mages in the Keep because they ran at the first flicker of flame between them. Ilae, tongue between her teeth with concentration, put a second burst of sparks a little lower down the steps to get them to keep their distance, but whoever was in charge of the Alketch troops had evidently thought of that one because the whole area around the Keep—and every foot of ground in the camp, set far enough from the walls to make spell-casting difficult for amateurs, said Ilae—had been swept and plucked of last year’s dead leaves and weeds like a king’s garden on his daughter’s wedding day.

  On the heels of the second flame-burst Lord Sketh stepped forth, raised high the white flag of truce, and cried out in the ha’al tongue, “Parley! We beg a parley!” while at the same moment Janus slammed shut the inner Doors and twisted the locking-ring.

  Gil was watching Ilae’s eyes. She saw them flare wide and heard the gasp of her breath and knew Lord Sketh had been fired on or otherwise attacked in the doorway. Minalde, watching, too, said in her very clear sweet voice, “I told that imbecile.”

  “He’s safe in,” said Ilae a moment later. “Melantrys got the Doors shut.”

  Janus and Caldern worked the locking-rings and opened the inner Doors. Sketh and Melantrys emerged from the glowstone-lit passageway between the outer Doors and the inner, Sketh blanched and trembling with shock, Melantrys pulling a crimson-feathered arrow out of the extravagant hide flap of her boot-top. Their feet crunched on the dry hay and tinder with which the gate-passage was heaped. Gil guessed his Lordship’s pallor was due in part to fear that Ilae would get his signals wrong and prematurely ignite this last-ditch incendiary defense.

  “Satisfied?” demanded Janus, who hadn’t forgotten Barrelstave’s imputation of warmongering.

  Minalde hurried forward and took Lord Sketh’s hands. “Thank you, my Lord,” she said, lifting her voice just a trifle so all around the gate could hear. “That took courage, braving the enemy. So now we know.”

  “They never even listened,” whispered Lord Sketh. He looked about to be sick. Lady Sketh hurried up, a stout blond woman almost as tall as her husband, the decoration and jewelry on her clothing making Alde look like a poor relation. “Never so much as paused. The moment I stepped forth, they started shooting, ran up the steps, swords drawn, with no intent to parley.”

  “Now we know,” repeated Minalde, patting his hand like a sister.

  Janus muttered sotto voce to Gil, “Like we didn’t know before. They pounding at the Doors now, Ilae, me love?”

  The mage shook her head, still standing under the nearest glowstone basket, scrying stone cupped in her palm. “They didn’t even come up to them. The minute they closed, they stopped.”

  Janus whistled through his front teeth, eyebrows raised. “So what then?” he asked. “They know there’s but the one entrance. What’re they waiting for? Someone inside to betray us?” He looked around, his reddish-brown eyes questing the faces of the Guards, of Lord Sketh, of Enas Barrelstave, who stood nearby looking equal parts shaken and indignant, and Lady Sketh who, in the process of enfolding her husband in several acres of fur-lined sleeves, was careful to include Minalde in the embrace as well.

  Gil was silent, a thought coming to her, but she said nothing until she and Minalde were walking back to the Royal Sector through the vast near darkness of the livestock-scented Aisle. As they crossed the last of the railless stone bridges, turned their steps toward the laundry-hung arch of the Roy
al Stair, Gil said softly, “Alde, we’re always hearing how the Doors are the only way into the Keep—how the Keep was built that way to be the perfect defense against the Dark Ones. Do we know those are the only doors?”

  “Yes,” said Minalde, startled. She stopped at the foot of the Royal Stair, plum-dark eyes wide, pinpricks of reflection swimming in them from the votive lamps of St. Prool’s statue in a niche. “I mean, Eldor said … All the records of the Keep say that it was built that way to keep the Dark Ones from entering …”

  “I know,” said Gil. “But we don’t have records from the building of the Keep. Only traditions, and hearsay, and tales.” She folded her arms and glanced back toward the Doors, where the Guards still crowded around Ilae. Men and women kept coming up to them, weavers and tub-makers and gardeners, asking questions and divesting themselves of their opinions with much arm waving and jostling. “Are we sure there’s no other way in? Because those people outside the gate sure act like they think there is.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about.” Bektis carefully replaced his scrying ball in its bags of silk, fur, and velvet, folded up the silver tripod, and stroked his milk-white beard. “Lord Vair was delayed by a White Raider attack on his camp, that’s all. They’re on the road again and should be with us by sunset.”

  Hethya started to look around her, but the wizard said casually, “Oh, I’m sure the other two have succumbed as well.” Tir looked around, too, and indeed neither of the other Akulae were in sight. But his movement caught Bektis’ attention: “And what is that child doing with his hands free?”

  “I took him into the woods to pee,” said Hethya, eyes flashing with annoyance. “I was never more than a foot and a half from him.” Under Bektis’ cold glare she led Tir back to the sycamore tree where he had been tied, put his hands behind his back and bound them carefully tight, then ran through them the rawhide rope whose other end was knotted to the trunk. “Stuck-up old blowhard. Are you all right, sweeting?”