Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “I won’t cry out.”

  “Sometimes men do,” said Vair. “There is a drug, you understand, that weakens the subject; would you be willing to wear a gag? That way there can be no fears, no apprehensions on the part of your friends.”

  “I am willing to do whatever you wish, Lord, but I promise you, I will not weaken.”

  “Good man.” Vair stepped forward and embraced the young soldier. “Good man.”

  No! Tir screamed, despairing, silent. Run away, Ugal! Run away!

  Tir watched as the young man stripped, and Shakas Kar stepped forward with a gag of metal and leather. Bektis offered the young man a cup first, which he drank as if it were sacramental wine. They gagged him then, and Hethya came in, with the haughty mien of Oale Niu, her eyes like stone. She and Shakas Kar brought from the table the black stone box, which contained—as Tir knew it would—a set of needles, some crystal, some silver, some iron, eight or ten inches long and tipped in jewels or beads of glass. These they drove into the young man’s flesh, at certain points—thohar points, whispered one of those distant memories, bringing with it a shudder of blackness, a desperate desire not to see anything further—while Ugal stood tall and beautiful, naked, head thrown back, wincing a little at the stabs but silent and proud. He had a knotted war-scar on one thigh and another on his left arm, and with his long white hair hanging about his shoulders he seemed like a splendid animal, like a father or an elder brother Tir had always craved.

  When the needles were all in his flesh Hethya and Bektis helped him climb up the wooden steps and lie down in the great iron vat with the carrion and the wood and dirt—as a warrior Ugal would have encountered worse. They adjusted something inside. Maybe, thought Tir, so that the needles sticking out of his back wouldn’t be pushed crooked when he lay down.

  He knew what was going to happen. In the dark of his mind he knew. Some one of his ancestors, under circumstances Tir could not imagine, had seen this done.

  Bektis walked over to the head of the tub and stood beneath the hanging swags of iron and crystal net. He closed his eyes. Tir saw Hethya look away.

  He was glad it all happened in the tub, where he didn’t have to look. He was glad Ugal was gagged, and drugged, too, though the young man did make noises through it, stifled screams and worse sounds, body sounds: squirtings and gushings; horrible, sodden, elastic pops, like leather exploding under pressure, and blood spraying up. Once Ugal’s head bounced up over the rim of the tub and Tir had to clap his hands over his mouth, press his eyes shut, swallow back the bile that came dribbling then out his nose.

  I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this, and he clung desperately to consciousness, unable to breathe, his mind screaming. I have to do this.

  Ingold had to know.

  But he couldn’t look, while footfalls creaked—Bektis’ or Hethya’s—and there was a soft noise of squishing, and the plop of something dripping where it had been spattered up onto the canopy. All he could remember was the taste of dates, carried and treasured with a young man’s cravings for sweets, all the way up from the devastated South.

  Then there was another sound, a muted, deadly whickering, like fire but thinner; an aura of power that raised the hair on Tir’s head. He bit down on his own sleeve, sinking his teeth into the dirty-tasting leather to keep from fainting, screaming, crying. In front of him he saw Hethya hand Shakas Kar something—the iron gag. Shakas Kar wiped it down with a rag. From the vat Tir heard the sounds of movement, thrashing, and saw the wagon-bed rock.

  Don’t scream, he told himself. Whatever you do, don’t scream.

  A man’s voice cried out random strings of sounds. An identical voice answered, “Atuthes! Atuthes!” Tir recognized the ha’al word for father. Something bleated, like a sheep with human vocal chords.

  Vair climbed the plank steps, swinging his whip a little in his gloved left hand. “Perfect,” he whispered, looking down into the vat. “Perfect.”

  Tir watched—Tir made himself watch—while the tethyn all came down from the vat. This part wasn’t bad, except that they all had Ugal’s face, they all had Ugal’s body, though without the scars. Like the Akulae they were hairless, and their skin looked funny, though in the lamplight it was hard to tell what was just tricks of shadow and moisture: patchy, smooth in places and rough in others.

  There were eleven of them.

  Nargois brought clothing out of the bales along the walls and gave it to them, but they only stood there staring at it stupidly, and he had to show them how to dress. This troubled the second in command. He passed a hand before the face of one Ugal and addressed him. The man answered with a faint, bleating grunt.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Vair shortly. “They’ll fight. That’s all that matters. Ugal!” he said, in a voice of command, and they all turned their heads at once, in a single movement.

  “It is good,” he said to Bektis. “It is good.”

  The men filed out when they were dressed, lumbering and shuffling in heavy coats, in wrapped rawhide leggings, Nargois nudging them along like a skinny black pale-eyed sheepdog.

  Eleven, thought Tir. There had never been more than four of any group of tethyn. He remembered—out of where he didn’t know—that four was all you could get, sometimes only three. Eleven was bad.

  When Nargois brought in another young man—when Vair said in that warm, friendly, fatherly voice, “Hastroaal isn’t it?” and Hastroaal replied eagerly, “Yes, my Lord”—Tir worked his way, with infinite slowness, back through the curtains, out into the darkness under the wagon, and so through the petticoat around the wagon’s bed and out to the outer blackness.

  “You understand the help I need from you? The greatness of the task I’m asking you to do?”

  “You know I’d follow you to the ends of time, my Lord …”

  “Good man. Good man …”

  Tir relieved himself away from the wagons—his bowels were liquid with disgust and fright—and then climbed back into his own wagon, snaking through the provisions to return to his nest of furs. His hands trembled so badly he could barely take off his mittens and coat, and he felt cold through to the marrow. The cold stayed with him, even under his blankets, growing deeper and deeper so that Tir wondered if he were dying. He tried to stay awake because he knew that when he went to sleep he’d remember fully, remember when he or that other boy had actually seen the whole thing, actually seen what happened in the iron vat (which was called a draik, he remembered, and wanted to scream at them, Stop telling me these things!).

  He woke up screaming, being shaken by a guard, an older man named Mongret, to whom he clung, sobbing, feeling as if his body would tear itself apart.

  “Is all right, Keshnithar,” the man soothed him, calling him by the name some of the guards used when Vair wasn’t there to hear: Keshnithar, Little King, though sometimes in good-natured jest they called him Drazha, Scarface. “Is all right. Oniox,” he called out to another man who had come by, “get the lady, would you? Our boy’s had a nightmare.”

  The other guard glanced back at the black tent and grunted. “Small blame to him. The very air’s evil tonight. She’s over there.”

  “Oh.” There was silence, the men looking at each other through the thrown-back curtain at the back of the wagon. “Ah. Well.” Mongret hugged Tir again, reassuring, but Tir knew that nobody was going to get Hethya. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to see her, for her clothing would smell of carrion and power and lightning, and he didn’t know if he could stand that. “Is just dreams, Little King,” he added, in broken Wathe. “You all right?”

  Tir sniffled, fighting hard not to seem a coward, and said, “I’ll be all right,” in the ha’al, which made both men smile.

  “That’s my little soldier.” The men liked him, though none of them would stand up to Vair for him. He didn’t blame them for this. Neither commented on the fact that his hands weren’t tied. “You want me stay a little, till you sleep?”

  Tir nodded. The man did
n’t speak the Wathe well enough to learn anything if he talked in his sleep. Mongret dried his tears with a rough, mittened hand, and Tir lay down, though he didn’t sleep. There was an odd comfort in knowing that whichever of his ancestors it was who had, willing or unwilling, witnessed what he had witnessed—who had seen the skin peel back, the organs burst, the head swell and pop like an overripe grape—had been as sickened, as appalled, as terrified as he; had wished, like him, that he had never seen it. It was as awful for a grown man as it was for a little boy.

  It was almost daylight when Heytha returned to the wagon, took off her heavy outer garments, and curled up in her blankets. She smelled of the cheap southern rum from the keg in the back of the food wagon, which they sometimes distributed when the nights were very cold. Tir listened to her breathing. He didn’t think she slept. Later on in the morning, when they were breaking camp, Tir saw that the camp was crowded with tethyn, over a hundred of them, and all with those strangely patched-looking skins, all with the same few faces: Tuuves, Hastroaal, Ti Men … Their eyes were blank, not like the eyes of the Akulae or of the tethyn who’d formed the train from Bison Knoll. Those had been slow and stupid but human. Though some of these could speak, others only grunted or made soft noises in their throats. When Tir encountered Ugal, wearing makeshift clothing and rawhide wrapped around his feet instead of boots, he had to run away behind one of the wagons and vomit.

  He was still kneeling there, soaked with sweat and shaking, when Hethya found him and told him that she had to take him to Vair. It was time the train moved on, out onto the Ice itself.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  With dawn they brought the Dark Lightning up to the ice face and began to carve.

  “Behold their road.” The Icefalcon wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. He had already seen how clouds hung over the ice cap, columns of gray and black and dazzling white where the sun struck them. Up on the Ice it would be world-winter indeed.

  “It is bad hunting.” Loses His Way passed him one of the double-sewn coats of bison-hide and a short-handled war ax. “Never have I seen so bad a hunt. See how the lady holds close to the boy? She fears for him.” From a distance he’d become very taken with Hethya.

  “She fears for herself. He is in her charge.”

  Loses His Way shook his head, and for a time they watched Hethya and Bektis, together at the controls of the Dark Lightning. The unholy colorless glim in the air wickered forth, played across the pearl face of the Ice. The notch at its edge deepened, steam gushing to join the cloud cover, and milky water flowed in a sputtering, steaming stream.

  “She is wise,” he said approvingly, watching her issue instructions to Bektis, who turned the Dark Lightning in its geared cradle, the apparatus moving like a hunting cat seeking prey. They had been busy in the night, for, around them, many new clones affixed leather boots to the feet of the mules and dragged the sledges up the rocks. Vair in his quilted garments of white fur and silk spoke to Hethya, and she returned some haughty reply. “She knows not to show her fear. Does your man in the ice pool know aught of this Dark Lightning, little shaman?”

  A few minutes previously Cold Death had blown on and rubbed one of the hard-frozen puddles near their camp, scratching the surface with a pebble and speaking Ingold’s name. The Icefalcon had been aware of the sweet high bird chitter of her voice all during the bringing up of the Dark Lightning, as she narrated what she saw to the Arch-mage of the Wizards of the West.

  He saw the old man in his mind, shaggy and scrubby and filthy as Ingold generally was after his journeyings, tucked like an apologetic old dog into some cranny of the rocks close enough to the besiegers to go and help himself to supper at their campfires. If he knew Ingold, the old man was doing it, too, on a nightly basis. The thought brought a pang of envy. The Icefalcon was heartily weary of pemmican.

  “Ingold says he has never heard of such a matter.” She came to the two men to watch, gloved hands shoved in her pockets like an impish girl. “But he did not seem surprised that the magic of the Ancestors of wizards could be turned to such a use.”

  “Did he say what he thought,” inquired the Icefalcon, “of this woman who claims to be possessed by the Ancestors of wizards? Whether what she says is possible?”

  “All things are possible,” replied Cold Death cheerfully. “From the remaking of the world to the rescue of this child. Come. If we’re to be on the Ice before them, it is well that we start to climb now. We have no Dark Lightning, no magic from the Ancestors of wizards, to help us.”

  The horses Cold Death turned loose to forage to the south, laying a Word on them to return at her summoning.

  Vair appointed ten men, none of them clones, and these took what remained of his horse herd and drove them away south. “A present for Blue Child,” said Cold Death, and grinned. “How kind!”

  But not the act, thought the Icefalcon, watching the beasts grow smaller in the desolate valley’s distance, of a man who had any intention of returning along the road he had come.

  Curious.

  The wall of ice that rose beyond Daylily Hill was broken into a succession of chimneys, towers, crevasses and blocks, mushrooms and cauliflowers of ice and fanged overhangs that forbade ascent. Snowshoes weren’t the only things the Icefalcon and his companions had worked on in the starlit dark and reflected ember glow. The thinner garments they’d taken from the cache, the empty food bags, and anything they could not use they had sliced up, weaving ropes of the rawhide strips.

  Still it was a difficult ascent. The Icefalcon led, hacking his way with an ax and cutting steps for the others, looping the rope that Loses His Way could follow. The food, and the rough sled they had made to drag it, they raised after them in slings, and last of all Yellow-Eyed Dog, puzzled but content to follow Loses His Way.

  The world at the top was alien beyond belief, long snowfields alternating with broken hogbacks and chopped zones of ice hills, rough seracs and towers all colorless, cold, and dead in the clouded light. Iron-hued rock ridges carved the distant horizons—the Icefalcon recognized with shock the crests of the Little Snowy Mountains—and dunes of snow rose to the west, hiding the notch carved by the Dark Lightning. Above those dunes, however, billowed columns of steam, marble-white in the grizzle of the sky.

  “They’ll know they’re being followed, do they but look over the crest of those dunes.” The Icefalcon contemplated the windblown powder snow, the mush of tracks they had left, and Yellow-Eyed Dog bounding idiotically about snapping at flying flakes. The cold tore at his face despite the thick coating of bison fat and seemed to eat through his gloves. His breath froze hard in his beard, and the air burned not only his lungs but his eyes and his teeth.

  “They know it already.” Cold Death shrugged. “What are three more barbarian scouts and a dog? Nothing in our tracks says, Here is a man who has trailed you from Renweth Keep. At least not in a tongue they can read.”

  The Icefalcon wasn’t happy about it—it offended his sense of fitness to leave so much as a mark on the snow—but he knew she was right.

  Still, he chose the hardest snowpack and black ice to traverse once they got their snowshoes on and led the way up the wind-carved slopes, single file to obscure their numbers, to a vantage point where they could observe the wagons’ ascent.

  Fog drowned the space beyond, the ice cut nearly hidden as the columns of steam spread and dispersed. In the dead light it was difficult to judge distances, and the murk made it worse; the sound of water trickling down the artificial couloir came dimly to them, with the sound of axes cutting steps in the snow and voices calling orders. A mule brayed, protesting to the Ancestors of animals at the task it was required to perform.

  “Cruel hunting, o my sister,” the Icefalcon murmured. “And to what end I do not know. We will now need your wisdom indeed.”

  They moved thereafter through a world of ice and fog, like wolves pursuing reindeer across the heart of winter. Sometimes they could approach the caravan no closer than several mile
s, laboring through rough ice and the broken wildernesses. At other times, when snow whirled down or white fog reduced everything to the ghostly stillness of the gray territory that lies between death and life, they drew nearer, concealed by Cold Death’s spells. By night they dug snow-caves in the sides of the long glacial ridges, and sometimes the Icefalcon would hack his way up a serac or block or ice tower, and sit for as long as he could endure the cold, watching the lights of the distant camp.

  These were the lands that had been the Night River Country. He knew it, sighting on the familiar peaks in the distance: the Yellow Ancestor, the Peak of Demons, the Peak of Snows, in exactly the distance and relationships he had known, it seemed, since before he knew his name. More than anything that knowledge, that awareness, lodged in the Icefalcon’s heart, a buried unacknowledged hurt, like an arrowhead embedded in his flesh; that under the Ice, under his feet, lay the world of his childhood summers, the aspens and the meadows and the place called Pretty Water Creek. The Ice had eaten it. Time had eaten it. Even when, in eons of time, the Ice disgorged it again, it would not be as it had been, but would be scoured and pressed and twisted out of recognition.

  He would be gone, too, of course. But those meadows now existed only in his mind, as the faces of the Ancestors of wizards existed only in the gray crystals Gil read in the Keep.

  This was not something of which he could speak to Loses His Way or to his sister; maybe not to anyone. Never in his life had he wept for anyone, for to weep was to be weak, and to mourn loss was to give power away to that which was lost, and to Time. But his heart wept for the Night River Country, the home of his childhood that was gone.

  In this bitter world, demons glided across the snow. By day they sometimes had the appearance of whirlwinds, and, in the short terrible nights, of flickering lights far off over the Ice. Their voices whined and sang even when the wind was still. Toward evening of the second day on the Ice one of the clones broke from his place in the line of march and stumbled, slipping and shrieking and brandishing his sword, toward the place where the Icefalcon and his companions struggled along on the other side of a flow-ridge.