Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  He looked around quickly. His sister was one of the few he could not hear come up on him. She sat down at his side, tiny in her great coat of musk ox-hide, with her black eyes peeking out from beneath her skraggy black hair.

  “She could not have lived, injured as she was,” he explained patiently, as he had explained before, twelve years ago and many times since. The brilliance of the moonlight was such that he was able to knot thongs on a pair of snow-shoes, a task he could have accomplished by touch in the dark; these he now set aside.

  “White Bear of the Salt People speared her through, and she and her horse fell together off the high rocks in the Place of the Brown Dogs. I saw them lying on the highest of the three ledges there. The others in the band were pinned down by arrow fire, farther along the canyon. By the time I reached her she would have been dead. She was too young to have come on the raid. She had not the strength to keep up, nor to save herself when she was in trouble.”

  “Yet you allowed her to come.”

  The Icefalcon shrugged. “She thought herself ready.”

  Cold Death considered him with those bright prairie-dog eyes. “Did you love her?”

  The Icefalcon looked away.

  “Or did you allow her to come with your raiding party only because you knew Blue Child did not permit her to ride with hers? Because you wanted—out of love for her and a desire to show up Blue Child—to give her what Blue Child would not?”

  The Icefalcon was silent. The doors of his heart shut, like the adamantine doors of the Keep, locked with hidden mechanisms of steel and guarded with the ghostly runes of ancient spells. Endlessly distant, some slunch-born nameless thing floated over the sterile landscape that spawned it and there was a bodiless crying of demon voices on the air. For a time it seemed to him that he could see the diminutive Dove standing with her arms upraised in the dawn of the Summer Singing, blood running from the ritual cuts in her palms and sides, her hair the color of the new-lifted light and her clear voice carrying to the heavens.

  He picked up his snowshoe again. “There was a time when I loved her. She had the heart of a young hawk, wanting to be a warrior, wanting to prove herself, to find her own name. She thought Blue Child was keeping her back on purpose, even while she loved her.”

  He knotted the leather and pulled it tight, fingers gauging the tension and the shape of the bowed wood. His fingers were blistered with cold already; he tucked his hand in his armpit. “I told her that this was not so. By then I knew that they were for one another, heart and soul, and I had given over that love.”

  “Did you think her ready to take on a warrior of the Salt People?”

  The Icefalcon shook his head. “I made an error.” He went back to lacing the leather and the wood, not meeting his sister’s eyes. “I have regretted it since. But Dove in the Sun made her own choice to ride with us. Blue Child knew this.”

  Beside him, Cold Death sighed. The glacier wind that whisked her breath like a white banner from her mouth bore on it the stench of the carrion in the wagons of Vair na-Chandros, the stink of the few sheep remaining, the smell of mules, and the waste of men who are eating badly of dried meat and slops.

  “Blue Child knew this and hated me.” The Icefalcon glanced back toward the shallow depression in the ground where Loses His Way slept, sharing his huddle of earth-colored robes with Yellow-Eyed Dog, invisible in the darkness. “What Blue Child did was worse than murder. The day will come when I will have a reckoning with the chieftain of the Talking Stars People.”

  Cold Death left him and went to sleep on the other side of Yellow-Eyed Dog. The Icefalcon blew on his frozen fingers and continued to work, finding comfort in the undemanding task and listening all the while to the night.

  At the end of that summer, when the Talking Stars People were once more in the ranges they’d disputed with the Salt People, he had returned to the Place of the Brown Dogs, though this was not the custom of his people, and had borne down the bones of Dove in the Sun, with some trouble, for they had been much scattered by coyote. He buried them farther back in the canyon, at the place where wild roses first appeared in spring. The Dove had loved wild roses, risking the bees that swarmed over the shallow streams to lie on the rocks and smell the blossoms.

  The place, the Icefalcon realized, was not many miles north of where he now sat.

  Around the fire pits of their hunting camps and the longhouse hearths of winter, the Icefalcon’s kindred had all his life told stories: about the habits of bison and the fat-rumped black sheep and the big antelope of the North, about tracking hares and how musk oxen breed, about weather conditions at different times of the year in Dwarf Willow Creek or in the Sea of Grass, about the Ancestors. Useful matters having nothing to do with old kings or wild roses.

  The Stars had spoken to the Ancestors, giving them spells and cantrips to keep their souls from being drunk away by the Watchers Behind the Stars and their eyes from being deceived by the illusions of the Dream Things.

  But above the glowing ice, the milky sheets of water that lay at the feet of those black barren hills, the Stars kept their counsel.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Vair na-Chandros and his men made camp beneath the diamond wall of the end of the world, the Ice in the North. From the sheltering curve of the shoulder of rock that had once been known as Daylily Hill, the Icefalcon watched them take down the wagon-boxes from their wheels and cut trunks of birch and elder to make sled runners.

  “Are all of them mad?” Loses His Way propped his shoulder against a deadfall spruce. “They cannot hope to get those wagons up the wall of the ice.”

  “It is an elaborate madness,” murmured the Icefalcon, folding his arms. The wind that streamed cold and steady from the ice stirred his long braids—he had left off shaving, finally, a few days ago, to let his beard protect his face. “And Vair na-Chandros would seem to have convinced a goodly number to join him in his fantasy.”

  Though Daylily Hill lay a fair distance from the camp, it was still possible to see what the tiny figures did: chopping trees, slaughtering the remains of the sheep herd, making additional sledges on which wood for fires was being lashed. One man was occupied in taking something from one of the wagon-boxes. “Boots for the mules,” said the Icefalcon.

  The Chieftain of the Empty Lakes People stared at him as if he’d said they would provide the mules with pink satin ball gowns. “They give their animals boots and let these wretched clones of theirs wrap their feet in hide like slaves?”

  “To keep them from skidding on ice,” said the Icefalcon. “It is a thing the mud-diggers do in the wintertime, when they wish to take a heavy load from one place to another.”

  “Why don’t they take their heavy loads in the autumn before the fall of the snow?”

  “Because they are fools,” said the Icefalcon. “They are mud-diggers.” But they had carved the bones of the hills to build their road and laid the foundations of bridges that still lay in the riverbeds as fords, even though that road led to the emptiness of the North. They had built the Keeps, proof against all the evil magic of the Dark.

  “They are asking for trouble,” he added after a time. “Even a child knows you draw and dress an animal if you plan to eat it.”

  “Perhaps they’re in a hurry. They may have seen the horses of the Earthsnake People.”

  Someone in the Earthsnake People had a spell that kept the horse herd close by their hidden camp, away over behind the hogback called Honey Ridge, and not enough sense not to use it.

  “They make camp for the night,” pointed out the Icefalcon. “And see, they’re only heaping the sheep carcasses up, near the black tent there.” The fact that men had erected the black tent against the side of the largest wagon made his nape lift with horror, and he was mindful that the last of the clones had died the previous day.

  Several of the laborers apparently agreed with the Icefalcon’s estimation of the proper method of transporting dead sheep. There was conference, heads shaken, argument: “Wha
t do they do?”

  “The finger game,” said the Icefalcon. Behind them among the fallen and dying spruces he heard Cold Death laugh. She was communing with Ingold Inglorion through the medium of a pool of frozen meltwater; over the weeks of journeying she had spoken to the old man nearly every night, and they had become fast friends. “They play it as we would cast a knucklebone, to choose a man for some unpleasant task. Ah,” he said, watching one unwilling man head in the direction of Vair na-Chandros, deep in conference with Bektis and the trap-mouthed Truth-Finder. “The matter explains itself. Myself, I should not only cast a knucklebone but cheat, were it a matter of speaking to that one.”

  The chosen unfortunate plainly thought so, too. He bowed and abased himself profoundly, gestured toward the dirty-gray piles of dead beasts.

  “Are they dogs, that they let themselves be whipped?” asked Loses His Way, when Vair had made his reply and the messenger, holding his bleeding face, returned to inform his colleagues that yes, his lordship really did want the entire sheep—wool, guts, and all—heaped beside the tent.

  “Generally,” said the Icefalcon.

  The scouts they had sent came back from the glacier. Vair na-Chandros listened to what they said, then turned and studied the ice itself. It towered above the camp, above the hills, an unimaginable opaline fortress whose translucence shed a queer blanched reflection on the faces of the men below. Cold-killed spruce, birch, hickory, and mountain laurel lay in a crushed gray rummage along its base, mixed with and buried under vast avalanche spills and chunks of rotting ice.

  A monster, thought the Icefalcon. A monster that would in time eat the world.

  “He is mad,” Loses His Way repeated after a little, “if he thinks he will get all his possessions to the top.”

  The Icefalcon shook his head. “Whatever else may be said of this Vair na-Chandros,” he murmured, “he is not mad.”

  The boy Tir was escorted from among the wagons. “It is well the woman is there to look after him,” said Loses His Way. “She is good, that one.”

  “She is the one who deceived him into leaving the protection of the Keep,” retorted the Icefalcon, with whom the subject of Hethya still rankled.

  Loses His Way shook his head. “I have watched her now many weeks,” he said. “People can be pressed into any hunting, good or ill, o my enemy. She cares for the child, and cares more for him each day. She has the way of one who has had a child herself. Has the boy been here, then?” For Tir made signs, pointing along the right side of the talus.

  The Icefalcon hesitated, not sure what to say. “It is a knowledge in his family.”

  “But how can he know what does not exist?”

  How indeed?

  He himself had gone to scout another way up the glacier, on the far side of Daylily Hill, a deep crevice and chimney that could be scaled with the help of axes. The road led to the North, but the end of the road was now covered in the trackless ice. Vair asked another question, and Tir assented, seeming very small and helpless among the men.

  If you strike him again, thought the Icefalcon, though he is no kin of mine and has no claim on me, still I will have an accounting from you.

  But Vair did not strike the child. Instead he gestured to Hethya, who even at this distance the Icefalcon could tell was possessed by the spirit—or imitating the mannerisms—of Oale Niu.

  “What new hunt is this?” murmured Loses His Way.

  Cold Death came over to them, having finished filling Ingold in on everything that had so far passed that day. The old man had finally reached Renweth Vale, she had informed them yesterday, having come down from the north over the St. Prathhes’ Glacier, a nearly impassable trek; he had been most interested in Vair’s journey.

  “Did you see this when you shadow-walked into the camp?” she breathed, and the Icefalcon shook his head.

  “It was packed in its boxes in a wagon.” His voice was the murmur of ice winds through the naked roots of fallen trees. “I thought the boxes had about them an evil light, like the thing in the tent. Do you know what it is?”

  She shook her head.

  Under Hethya’s instructions, the crates were opened, the pieces lifted out and put together by Bektis and the Truth-Finder, helped by the scout the Icefalcon called Crested Egret, a clever young man who managed to stay at Vair’s side without ever incurring his wrath. Tubes of gold of varying thicknesses looped over balls of glass, crystal rods bound in iron and covered over with brittle-looking encrustations of salt.

  “Is she indeed possessed of the spirit of an Ancestor of the shamans?” asked Loses His Way, as Hethya moved forward to help connect the many components into one single, sleekly lumpy finger, glittering like an extension of the ice wall itself.

  “Either that or some instruction survived, writ on paper or embedded in the heart of a Wise One’s crystal, that she studied to lend credence to her lies.” The Icefalcon, crouching beside him, rested his crossed hands on his drawn-up knees. “Anyone can make up stories—it is an art among the mud-diggers, and many are adept at it.”

  “Pah,” said Loses His Way. “She has not the look of a woman who tells lies.”

  Oh, hasn’t she? he thought. But he only said, “It has something of the look of the things we found in the Keep many years ago. Rudy and Ingold made of them weapons that spat fire at the bidding of the Wise Ones, but they did not work overwell. They needed no Ancestor of shamans to show them how such things were made.”

  Slowly, with dignity, Hethya walked around the apparatus, touching the tubes and the rods, the balls that fit sometimes into the rods and sometimes into one another. Bektis nodded wisely at her side. Gil, thought the Icefalcon, would be open-mouthed with awe, but to him it was merely what it was, glass and iron, gold and salt, elements of the earth that had existed in their current form only somewhat longer than other formations of the same substances. Hethya emphasized a point with a sweeping gesture that would have shamed a marketplace preacher in the days before the coming of the Dark, and her voice carried dimly across space to the three watchers—possibly to other watchers as well.

  Still, it was a wonder when it was finished. It lay glistening in a cradle of geared wheels such as Ingold tinkered with in the crypts of the Keep, haloed, it seemed, by some curious condensation of the thin wicked afternoon light. Tir hung back, as if he would conceal himself between the wagons—he came forward when Vair beckoned, but unwillingly and, when asked a question, would only shake his head.

  Hethya and Bektis stood beside the new apparatus. It was Hethya who worked its ivory levers, making the whole of it swing about suddenly, like a live thing, articulate, quivering, balanced to a hair. Bobs and wires whipped like the antennae of an insect, and lights sang from the jewels that hung on their tips.

  A strange shiver passed through the Icefalcon, the uneasy sense that Gil-Shalos was right. This was more than elements combined.

  There was a silence like the silence before an ice storm, a hushed waiting fear of the unimaginable.

  Bektis laid his hands where Hethya showed him—tiny figures, gray and gold, white and red against the flinty gray rocks, the rinsed-out aqua ice.

  Then a flash, less like lightning than as if a star had spoken a curse of power, a curse that extended like a tickling feather a delicate, whickering, colorless whisper of unseen flame. The sound that cracked across the valley was, the Icefalcon was sure, only the sound of the rock splintering where the shimmer touched it. A great chunk separated from the wall of the promontory before them, pitching down the scree. Then like the sea-yammer came the wild whinnying of the mules and horses and all the men crying out.

  Even old Nargois, whom the Icefalcon had observed to be a man of calm courage, fell back, hands fluttering in the signs against demons.

  Only Vair remained where he was, observing with interest as Hethya moved the levers again. Bektis, who had flinched, stepped forward to lay his hands upon the apparatus again. Another shimmer, as if the air between the crystal horns of the ma
chine and the raw rock wall had flawed, like the break in a pane of glass. The Icefalcon saw a slab of rock jerk outward, break, and tumble free down the slope before he heard the sound of it, a deep, booming crack and the hiss of heat.

  “This is bad hunting,” whispered Loses His Way, when any of them could speak again.

  Bad hunting indeed, thought the Icefalcon. Three weeks’ journey away that they were, he could not but feel that things would be worse still for the folk of the embattled Keep.

  “What did she say?” Gil and Minalde both got to their feet as Ilae emerged from the hidden chamber in the crypt. The young mage stood in the doorway for a moment, a tall gawky girl, and gestured with one long-fingered hand that she was all right.

  Encountering Brycothis, the mage spirit who dwelled in the heart of the Keep, was, Rudy had told Gil, frequently a disorienting experience.

  Both Rudy and Ingold had tried to describe what it was like; Gil had the impression it was something only fully understood by another mage. Brycothis herself—Gil had seen her image in half a dozen of the ancient record crystals, a rangy woman with smiling eyes and the tattooed scalp of a wizard of those days—had long ago transmuted into something far other than human, a pattern of memories and power whose center lay in the heart of the crypts. Those who entered that center, whose minds touched hers, experienced different things at different times.

  “Did she speak to you?” Not that Brycothis actually spoke. Minalde led the girl to the bottom step of the hidden stairway, where she and Gil had waited, and made her sit down.

  “Oh, yes.” Ilae nodded hesitantly. “I mean, I saw things. She was there.” She nodded quick thanks as Gil handed her the flask of tisane—now lukewarm—she and Alde had been sharing. “But I didn’t understand what I saw.”

  Gil and Alde were silent. Shy and slow-spoken at the best of times, Ilae thought for a while, then said, “I asked her, was there another way into the Keep. And I saw …” She spread out her hands helplessly. “I saw the laundry room up on the third level, back behind the sanctuary of the Church.”