Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “This I will not forgive.”

  Cold Death called the names of the horses into the wind, and the horses came, trotting up from the long grass of the coulee, snuffling and ears pricked. Ashes, Scorpion Eater, and Afraid of Flowers had been joined by two others, southern horses who had escaped during the raid, and they, too, were laden with blankets, furs, and supplies.

  So they mounted and rode north, into the rocks and gorges and lava beds called the Cursed Lands. The caravan moved, and the Icefalcon followed, and the stink of the corpses could be smelled in its wake until Bektis repeated his spells while wearing the crystal hand. The moon waxed to full and began to wane again, and somewhere behind them, the Icefalcon was aware, drifted the Talking Stars People, like vultures riding the thermals and waiting for a sick animal to fall.

  No road existed in the Cursed Lands, yet the wagons made their way north and slightly west unerringly, without halts and queries and casting about. The Icefalcon remembered the pale trace in the gamma grass, invisible from the ground but straight as a bowstring. At night, or with the first dove-colored light, the frost a silver dust in the grass, the Icefalcon would see Vair na-Chandros and the woman Hethya come out from among the wagons with Tir between them, Tir thinner and more haggard by the day. The Icefalcon never came close enough to hear—with Bektis in the train he did not dare—but it seemed to him that it was Tir who pointed to the gaps in the hills and gave directions by the dim-shining stars.

  The land grew harsher. Gullies and washes creased the bare clay hills, steeper than before, dividing the scattered prairies where slunch glowed filthily in the dark. Twice the Icefalcon shadow-walked, investigating the edges of the camp and seeking a way to extricate Tir from Vair’s grip. But Tir was kept bound much of the time, and there were many guards, facing all ways, inward and out. Cold Death was as fearsome a warrior as she was a shaman—something no one ever thought, to look at her—but with Bektis’ crystal hand, even her aid might not suffice to get the boy away safely. Vair would kill Tir rather than permit his escape. And, for all her frivolousness, the Icefalcon was fond of his sister and would not like to see the lightning of that cursed crystal hand skewer her as it had skewered Rudy. There would and could be only a single attempt, and it had better succeed.

  Whatever it was that Vair wanted, it lay in the North.

  His mind returned to the trace he had seen from the air. The work of the Times Before, built in the ancient days beyond the memories of the People of the Real World. He asked Cold Death about it, but Cold Death, who knew the properties of every herb and root in the great grasslands of the Real World, and the names of the ki of each tree and stream, could only say, “I have never heard of such a thing, o my brother.”

  And Loses His Way, who could (and nightly did) detail the family histories of every horse belonging to his own people and any number of other clans and tribes from whom the Empty Lakes People raided horses—who could recognize the prints and scat of king mammoths and individual musk oxen and reindeer in half a dozen herds and tell stories about them—only shook his head and said, “That’s foolish. Nothing lies in the North but the Ice. Why would anyone build a road thence?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” the Icefalcon snapped, exasperated, though he knew he would have received a similar reply from Noon or any of his friends in his family—Red Fox or Stays Up All Night or Fifty Lovers. And though Loses His Way could, like any of the people in the Real World, speak of the habits of animals long dead, or the small details of war parties and hunts for generations back, or recount from memory weather conditions mentioned to him in passing forty leagues to the south, he had very little interest in the slunch-born things that roved the hills abandoned by gazelles and rhinoceri, the lumpy misshapen beings that Gil said were broken echoes of life as it had been years uncounted in the past.

  Why? the Icefalcon wondered. Lost dreams, Gil called them, woven in the slunch and repeated without meaning—but whose dreams? And what had the world been like that had spawned them?

  He had been affected, he thought, a little embarrassed, more than he knew, by the habits of civilized folk and did not like to speak of this to his sister or to Loses His Way. And indeed, it was not the way of the Talking Stars People to show interest in such matters, which had no bearing on life as it was lived in the Real World.

  Still, the road was there. And as the cold grew more piercing, and the great sheets of slunch that even the wind could not rustle lay more and more frequent and their voiceless denizens took the place of the creatures that had once grazed these dying prairies, the Icefalcon welcomed the far-off plaints of the Alketch sheep and the squeak of wagon axles, the only living sounds to break the stillness of these lands.

  It was high spring, and they rode through a world filled with light. But the temperature fell, and the thunderstorms that at one time had crashed and raged daily over these lands were mute and absent as the vanished birds. There was only the wind itself, bearing the smell of stone and sleet.

  By day they followed, and by night they worked by the tiny light of hidden fires, cutting hickory saplings where they found them for snowshoes and sled runners and slicing up coats of bison or musk ox or sheep to sew with sinew the pieces into double-layer garments, fur inside and out.

  Twice the train halted for a day, by streams full enough that Vair, and Nargois, and Hethya, and some of the others could heat water and bathe in a tent set up for the purpose, and the priest held rites in praise of the Straight God.

  Then one day in the distance the Icefalcon saw a glittering rind of blue-white, flashing in the heatless ghost of the sun.

  It was too soon, he thought, far too soon. They should only be drawing near to the aspen groves, the woods of birch and maple, the streams and meadows that lay to the south of the Night River Country, his people’s summer range and the home of his heart.

  Loses His Way had told him this; Cold Death, too. But he understood that his heart had not believed. The land of his childhood’s joy, the place that would have been the center of his defenses as warchief of his people, was lost to him, buried under the rolling weight of time and snow and fate.

  He could not deny to himself that he looked upon the Ice in the North.

  “I was ill on that journey.” Hethya gazed somberly into the leaden morning distance, with what Tir had come to recognize as Oale Niu’s eyes. “The Dark Ones came, surrounding our encampment. We, the mages, fought them, ringing the camp with walls of fire and lightning. Their power was terrible.” She turned her face a little aside and passed her hand across her brow, as if to erase the mark of pain that appeared there. “We survived, but some of us lay like the dead for many days afterward, unable to move or speak.”

  She looked across at Tir, changeable eyes inscrutable, her mouth half hidden behind the heavy quilting of her collar. “Do you not remember this, Lord Altir?”

  Tir shivered, though he was bundled thick in a coat of furs, a princely garment wrought in the fashion of the South. Vair had given it to him, for the cold was deepening daily, and though it was May there was frost every night. Even through the layer of brocade, and the soft padding of lynx-hide that protected his narrow shoulders, the pressure of Lord Vair’s hooks reached his flesh. It wasn’t as bad as the tall man’s pale eyes, which he felt pierce the back of his head.

  “I don’t …” he began, and then saw something else in her gaze.

  Not Oale Niu’s eyes. Hethya’s, peeking from behind them as behind a mask. Scared.

  He swallowed, nodded. “I don’t … I don’t remember their names.” It was the first time he had lied about his memories. He looked away quickly, gazing at the plain before them. Sheets of water covered the rock and stunted grasses, milky with pulverized stone and floating with cakes and chunks of pale-blue ice, dyed straw and primrose and the fragile pink of sand lilies with the coming day. Blots of slunch festered on such dry land as there was, further blurring and confusing the landscape, but some things had not changed. />
  Put everything else out of your mind, Rudy had told him once. Don’t worry about what you think we need around here, Ace, or what Gil’s trying to find out about those guys. Just tell me what you really see, whether it makes sense or not.

  It was hard to put Lord Vair out of his mind.

  “The road ran that way.” He pointed toward the broken wall of black talus and scree, four days’ journey across the drowned plain. Through every fang and promontory of the broken dark hills ice glimmered, an unearthly, unholy aqua in the nacreous dawn. “It went around the right side of that hill. The Big Guardian, they called it. There was a valley going back.”

  “If I may point out,” said Bektis, stroking his beard, “the logical course for a road to follow would be to the left of that promontory, not the right. The watercourse begins there, as you see, my Lord. The way will be easier for the wagons as well.”

  “Which is it, boy?” Vair’s voice was a razor, opening the side of Tir’s face again in his imagination, peeling away the half-healed flesh to expose bone and brain and the trembling pulp of self. “Left or right?”

  Tir closed his eyes. His throat, his chest, his stomach all clenched on themselves with terror of another beating, another session with the hooks. Since his earliest awareness Rudy had taught him to trust his memories, to call them forth gently and easily, letting come what would: If you don’t see anything, just say, “Hey, man, I don’t remember.”

  Tir didn’t like to think about what would happen if he said to Vair na-Chandros, “Hey, man, I don’t remember.”

  But lying about what he saw was something else.

  The hooks pricked through the heavy brocade, the protecting furs. “Left or right?” Tir felt panic flood him and tears fill his eyes.

  “Grant the child a moment to consider,” cut in Oale Niu’s dry, matriarchal voice. The glimpse of Hethya he had seen was completely gone. “How correctly could you have answered your schoolmasters, my Lord, with a knife against your face?”

  “It was right.” Tir’s voice peeped like a mouse from his constricted throat. “I remember us leaned over walking like this …” He balanced his weight sideways, seeing in his mind the train of mules and horses, the square black shape of his father’s shoulders—that other boy’s father, with the long tail of gray hair hanging down his back—higher on the slope than the thin small bald-headed man who rode beside him.

  The way their heads bowed against the rain. The way the bald-headed man gestured while he talked. He was there. He’d been there, the Big Guardian looming crookedly against harsh gray sky.

  They had gone around the Big Guardian—differently shaped now, shorter and wider at the base, but still recognizable after three thousand years—to the right, although from where they stood he could see no sign of road in the broken, rock-covered slope.

  Because she had helped him he added, “The men had trouble because they were carrying—carrying a … a lady mage in a litter.” He half closed his eyes again, extrapolating how it would have been, and said, “The men on this side”—he gestured with his left hand—“were higher than on that.” He waved his right and then was still, trembling with terror, praying Vair wouldn’t hurt him anyway.

  “You are not,” said Vair softly, “trying to lose us in the wilderness, are you, child?” The metal of the hooks, freezing cold in the bitter air, brushed the side of his cheek. “Or making a game of us? Because I tell you, it will go worse for you if you are.”

  Tir’s trembling increased. Tears began to trickle from his eyes and snot from his nose, and he found it impossible to speak, fearing the results of whatever he might say. This happened to him often these days, and he was always overwhelmed with shame when it did, but he couldn’t help himself. He shook his head.

  “Tell me yes or no, child,” pressed that inexorable voice.

  It took everything he had. “No, my Lord.”

  Lord Vair’s silences were terrible, for they were unreadable, containing cloaked violence and rage without reason. The men went in fear of him, too, fear almost as great as their love for him. But this time he said, “Then we will pass to the right,” in a perfectly normal voice. “Is the way safe, Bektis?”

  “I believe it to be, yes, my illustrious Lord.” The Court Mage made another of his formal salaams. After the second or third time he’d tried to ensorcel the carrion wagons, he’d taken to wearing the crystal device all the time on his right hand—with no glove under it, as if he could not stand to lose contact between the jewels and his flesh. He was always cradling it and stroking it with his left, continuously but unconsciously, the way he caressed his beard. “In all my scrying in these lands I have not seen sign of the White Raiders, after those first attacks.”

  “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there.” The words came out of Tir almost involuntarily, and he wanted the next second to stop up his own mouth and never speak again.

  The hooks twisted in his collar. “Are you mocking at us, child? Or making a game of your elders?”

  “No, my Lord.” His throat closed, bringing his voice down to a whisper again. “Really no.” Please don’t hurt me, he thought, but he’d already learned that pleading only made everything worse. Sometimes. Not always. “Just that the Icefalcon told me that a lot of the White Raiders carry amulets, or have their Wise Men and shamans ride with their scouting parties, so the shamans of their enemies can’t see them.”

  “I believe,” said Bektis, with stiff sarcasm, “that my skills are somewhat more advanced than those of barbarian bone-scryers.”

  “Even Ingold can’t see Raiders coming up on the Vale half the time,” said Tir. “Really.”

  The Icefalcon himself never spoke of it, but the other children of the Keep—mostly the herdkids who had been his friends before they had all perished in the ice storm of the Summerless Year—whispered stories about what the Raiders did to captives. Though he would have loved to see Lord Vair come to grief, he knew they’d kill Hethya, too. All the men in Lord Vair’s train, many of whom he was coming to know, like Ugal, who’d brought him the dates, were blameless as well and didn’t deserve slaughter. Being here wasn’t their fault.

  “Bektis?”

  “I think the child is merely being difficult,” the wizard stated coldly. He pulled his coat collar more closely around his face; the end of his nose was red with chill. “Yet it could not hurt to keep more men on patrol.”

  Vair na-Chandros pulled his hooks free of Tir’s collar and turned back to the camp, followed by the wizard, the child, and Hethya. Hethya still bore herself with the haughty mein of Oale Niu, but she put her arms around Tir’s shoulders as he walked; Tir was already crying, involuntarily, from reaction to fear. He hated himself for it and tried not to do it where the men could see. He was Eldor Andarion’s son and didn’t want them to think him a sissy. Since Lord Vair had told him, many days ago now, that Bektis had seen in his scrying ball that his mother and Rudy were dead, and his sister Gisa with them, it seemed to him that he couldn’t stop crying.

  The Keep was under siege, they said, and would be broken open soon, and everyone killed. He had nowhere to go, and no one to turn to now. The only people he knew in all the world were Bektis, and Hethya, and Lord Vair.

  They entered the Night River Country, and the clones began to die. Nearly three weeks had passed since the attack by the Empty Lakes People. The Icefalcon wondered whether clones only lived for a few weeks or whether they were more than humanly susceptible to the cold. Ahead of them, the ice stood behind the badlands hills in a luminous wall.

  The copses and meadows along the Night River had been the easternmost of the summer grazing lands of the bison and wild sheep herds of the Talking Stars People, the place of summer memories of rich pasture and short light-filled nights. It had been the place, too, of raids by other people attempting to poach on the herds that were the birthright of the Talking Stars People or to steal horses whose pedigrees equaled the bloodlines of great chiefs. Loses His Way pointed out the place where h
e nearly speared the Icefalcon during the Summer of the Two White Mammoths, and the Icefalcon said haughtily, “You missed me by ten inches, and your spear was too dull to have pierced my tunic,” at which they both laughed. The lands were barren now and sheeted with meltwater from the glaciers, where it wasn’t blotched with slunch. There was no hunting. All three were living on pemmican and dried lemming, and even Yellow-Eyed Dog looked thin.

  A few days previously the Icefalcon had cut the tracks of the Talking Stars People, and though they’d covered their traces well he still recognized the hoofprints of Blue Child’s horse Merrykiller in their midst. Logically, if they were trailing the caravan, they’d move up Dwarf Willow Creek, or what was left of it. Scrying and scouting the lands around them, Cold Death claimed she also had seen a band of the Earthsnake People, two hundred and two strong, led by their chieftain Pink Flowering Vine. The Icefalcon wondered whether they were aware of the presence of Blue Child and her warriors, or she of theirs.

  In the nights the phosphor sheen of the slunch reflected in the thin meltwater lakes, and across those glowing sheets, by the light of cloud-dimmed summer stars, the Icefalcon half saw, half guessed the beating of demon wings. Few demons dwelt in the Vale, and those that did seldom impinged on human affairs, but since his experiences of shadow-walking he felt a greater awareness of their presence and a greater uneasiness of them. They piped and hooned and whistled on the water and called out in the semblance of those the Icefalcon had known here or echoed the voices of those who had once ridden through these lands.

  Sitting on guard in the heavy jacket of mammoth wool that had been woven by a woman of the Empty Lakes People, he thought he heard Noon’s voice: I thought to make you truly my son. Or was it, You have betrayed us all, my son? Another time he thought he heard Blue Child’s cold slow tones, whispering the promise to give someone his horses and, later, the free joyous laugh of Dove in the Sun.

  Beside him, Cold Death said softly, “Is it true that you left Dove in the Sun to die?”