Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  The man came smashing through the thin crest of the ridge almost on top of the Icefalcon. The Icefalcon had his sword in his hand already and aimed for his neck, but the man ducked at the last moment and the blade caught him on the collarbone. The clone turned and lunged at him again, sword drawn, grinning like a dog, and as the Icefalcon stabbed him through the chest he realized that the man was possessed of a demon.

  The demon came out of the man’s mouth like a glowing mist that thrashed and clawed at the Icefalcon’s eyes and face for a moment and then was gone. The body of the dead clone lay in the snow at his feet.

  Shouting on the other side of the snow ridge. The Icefalcon, Cold Death, and Loses His Way fled, sliding and slithering down the ridge, with Yellow-Eyed Dog bounding happily behind. Later, after the sergeant in the red boot-laces had looked at the dead man, cursed about barbarians, stripped off all the clothing and weapons and gone away again, they returned to look at the body.

  “He makes his warriors out of air.” Cold Death knelt to touch the hairless face, already rimed with frost. “Or wood and dirt and dead flesh, as the case may be. But he can’t make a man’s soul. It was only a matter of time before the demons found a way into the living flesh.”

  “Will they seek us out again?” Loses His Way fumbled at his heavy furs, as if to touch the amulet he wore against his skin beneath. “I have an amulet made for me by Walking Eyes.”

  “Amulets work against demons because the demons are spirit only,” said Cold Death, standing up again and grabbing Yellow-Eyed Dog by the ruff to pull him away from the corpse. “The flesh of these things may protect the demons from the amulets’ power …”

  “With Walking Eyes’ amulets,” the Icefalcon added unkindly, “it wouldn’t take much.”

  There was an outcry from farther off, and the clashing of swords. The three warriors scrambled up the trampled flow-ridge to see what the problem was. Two other clones had attacked their fellows, cutting madly all about them with swords and daggers, the blood like scattered poppies, garish on the snow. Even at the distance of half a mile the Icefalcon could hear them laughing crazily as they were dragged down and killed.

  “They eat fear,” said Cold Death softly. “Live on it, as butterflies drink perfumes.”

  Vair stood over the fallen bodies of the two clone lunatics. There was no need to see his face. His whole body was a threat, a quest for someone to savage. Bektis, beside him, explained at great and mellifluous length why none of this was his fault.

  In time Vair turned aside, but it was clear from the way he moved that he was not a happy man.

  Later in that same day they reached the far edge of the snowfield. The ice buckled and faulted in a maze of towers and crevasses, huge wind-carved ridges interlaced like the fingers of a hand. This formation narrowed toward the north, and the Icefalcon guessed it was in fact a continuation of the valley he had known as the Place of the Bent-Horned Musk Ox, which even in his day had been walled by hanging glaciers.

  The caravan stopped, and Tir and Hethya were summoned. The Icefalcon was able to work his way to within a hundred feet of them. Tir was saying, “There was a creek that came out of the hills here. A canyon went back into the ridges, that way.” He gestured with one mitted hand. The day had cleared with the advance of evening, and the mountains to the north were clearly visible; about a day east lay a line of broken-toothed black rocks thrusting through the gashed jumble of ice. Everything flashed in the high pearly light, the snow like cloud and the Ice a thousand shades of blue and green where the wind scoured it, the mules panting under their fur robes, frost forming on their muzzles as it formed on the beards of the true men, the bare flesh of the faces of the clones.

  In the wan strange light Tir’s face looked like a little skull amid the gray fur of his hood, nothing left of it but the great blue eyes and the unhealed tracks of cuts. Are they trying to starve the boy to death? The wounds had the look of malnutrition to them, and his face was bruised in a way the Icefalcon did not like.

  “Certainly the lie of the ice seems to indicate that the land beneath rises in that direction.” Bektis stroked his snowy beard. “But whether we are in fact at the place where we must bend our course eastward to meet the valley of which the child speaks …”

  Tir took a deep breath; it seemed to the Icefalcon that he was trembling. He closed his eyes.

  “There was … there were three creeks that came together,” he said slowly. “Right here. There was a waterfall, and a pool. We saw a wolf drinking there one night. Daddy—Father—We turned there. The road turned there. We made for that notch in the ridge.” He pointed. “We journeyed through the night, and I remember the sound of the water running beside the road.”

  “And if you traveled in darkness,” retorted Bektis spitefully, “where were the Dark Ones? They should have been thick about your train as wasps around honey.”

  “I don’t know!” Tir almost screamed the words. “I don’t know! I just say what I remember, and that’s what I remember!”

  “Don’t speak disrespectfully to Lord Bektis.” Vair caught the boy under the chin. “He doesn’t like it. I don’t like it, either, to hear a child of your years lash out like a savage. And stop crying.” For Tir had begun to sob uncontrollably. “You’re a pitiable thing.” Casually, he released his grip and slapped him, in a single move. The slap was hard enough to stagger Tir. Hethya looked away.

  “Make your apology.”

  “I’m sorry, Lord Bektis.”

  I will kill him, thought the Icefalcon, very calmly, seeing the child’s face and body, hearing the child’s voice.

  He understood, and had agreed with, Ingold’s decision to remain in Renweth Vale, relayed to him through the usual medium of an ice face and Cold Death. There was no way the old man could have overtaken Vair’s caravan in time to be of help. It was clear to them both that there was some threat to the Keep far beyond Vair’s eleven hundred henchmen camped outside it, something that in all probability neither Wend nor Ilae would be capable of dealing with. But beneath his warrior’s logic, the logic of the Real World, he wished he could at least have the knowledge and comfort that the mage was on the way to help where he could not.

  “The three springs are what you remember?”

  “Me lord,” said Hethya, her Felwoods brogue breaking into Lord Vair’s cold, focused scrutiny of Tir, “me mother was a witch of sorts. She could track the course of a stream underground, miles through the woods. Folk were all the time after her to do it for the farms. Could perhaps me Lord Bektis do the same beneath all this ice, and tell us if there are three springs down there?”

  Bektis grumbled and began to make passes with his hands above the ice. After a little time he reached into his muff and brought out the crystalline Device, which he affixed to his hand, pulling off his glove to do it and immediately surrounding himself with a heatspell that coalesced in curls of fog. The Icefalcon withdrew silently into the aquamarine chasms of ice, but followed the train as it veered eastward and dug a shelter within a hundred yards of it that night.

  The clouds returned with nightfall, segueing into a morning of strange fogs, but by midday there was no further need of Tir’s navigation. Through the shadowy grayness and blowing ice the nameless mountain ridge pushed higher, a line of coaly rock like a cresting wave about to break, and at its base lay a great blister in the ice, a huge mound some five miles long, ancient ice, green and black at its heart and unchanging, the slow-moving floes all fractured and broken around its sides.

  “What is it?” Loses His Way squinted against the shadowless glare, for in the white world beneath the clouds one was not sure if what one saw was what one seemed to see.

  “At a guess,” the Icefalcon murmured, “the ice is shaped by something that lies buried beneath.”

  * * *

  “Hethya?” Tir rolled over a little and propped up on one elbow in the wagon’s dark. By her breathing Hethya didn’t sleep, either, and he wondered if she had the same dreams that h
e did, about Ugal’s head bobbing up over the side of the iron vat, blood-gorged purple flesh bulging out around the iron of the gag, ready to burst, eyes conscious wells of agony. No matter how close he held to her, no matter how many furs and blankets they piled on, he couldn’t seem to stop shivering.

  Her voice was not the slightest bit sleepy, but muted, so the guard outside wouldn’t hear. “What is it, me lamb?” Southland rum whiffed on her breath. It was often so now, at night.

  “Did your mama teach you about the machines? About how to work them?”

  He felt her breath still. Then she said, “Faith, lamb, me mother was a hedge-witch and a scholar, not one of the great old ones. I’ve said how it was, when as a little girl this voice would speak words in me head that only I could hear or understand. Oale Niu, now, the great d’ian sian, Ladymage and Queen … Whyever would you think it was me mother?”

  But there was wariness in her voice.

  “Well, in the Keep we found these crystals,” said Tir. “And Gil and Ingold”—he still couldn’t speak Rudy’s name—“they found a way to look into them with this black table, and they see a lot of things, things from the Times Before. That’s how they learned to bring the potatoes back to life, the earth apples, so everyone could have enough to eat.”

  His stomach clenched at the mention of eating. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to eat again.

  “And if your mother was a witch and found some of these crystals, or some other things written about those old machines, I thought maybe she’d have taught you about them. Especially if there were machines like that hidden in Prandhays Keep.”

  “Well, you’re a sly one, and that’s a fact,” she murmured. “But I’m afraid you’re out, me lamb, though it’s true the … the dethken iares”—she carefully mispronounced the words Oale Niu used for the chknaïes—“was at our Keep, or part of it was, anyway. Oale Niu, she showed me the way of it, long before Lord Vair turned up with the rest of it all in pieces and jumbled together with bits of other things.”

  “Where did he get it?” He tried to sound casual and evidently succeeded.

  “He’s not said—he’s a close one, the evil old so-and-so—but me, I think despite what all the southrons say about their land being pure of wizardry from the days of dawn and all that other chat … I think there was a Keep there in that city of theirs, that Khirsrit, once upon a time. And when he got driven out of the South by that poor girl he made his wife, bad cess to him, he took what he could.”

  “And did he take over Prandhays Keep?”

  Hethya was silent for a time, running a lock of Tir’s hair through her fingers. The iron winds had fallen, and noises could be heard around the camp, the squeak of the guards’ boots in the snow, a man cursing one of the tethyn—the whole men, the real men, were always cursing the tethyn, usually for their stupidity. Hitting them, too, though Tir wanted to protest that it wasn’t the tethyns’ fault they were stupid. It was Vair’s, for making them wrong.

  Still, there was a tension in the camp, a fear, screwing tighter and tighter. Yesterday a tethyn—one of the Hastroaals—had run amok, away from the lines, and had been killed by White Raider scouts not a hundred feet from the line of march; later a Ti Men and a Cia’ak had started attacking everyone in sight with their swords. They were possessed by demons, the men said. Though Vair said this was not so, he and Bektis had distributed the demon-scares that usually hung around the camp on poles and wagon-boxes among the men for the rest of the march.

  At least twenty hadn’t given them back tonight, when they needed to make a Warding around the camp.

  Everybody was scared. And the great silent whaleback of the ice mountain, that giant green-black blister under its covering of snow that overshadowed the camp, made it worse.

  And if they knew what was under there, thought Tir despairingly, they’d be more scared than they were.

  He shut his eyes, trembling and suddenly sick at the thought, and Hethya, feeling him shiver, hugged him tight.

  “Well, and he did take over Prandhays,” she said softly, and by her voice she was lost in a bitter dreaming of her own. “This past summer it was, in the days of the harvest, not that there was a great deal of that, and if me mother had lived I misdoubt it would have made a hair’s difference. He’s been gatherin’ his southron troops and the local bandits together there ever since, him and that Delta Islands brute Gargonal, may the flesh rot from their stinking bones.”

  The hate in her voice made him turn his head, though nothing of her could be seen in the blackness. Her hand felt like a piece of wood, closing on his shoulder.

  “Bastards, all of ’em, and Vair the biggest bastard of ’em. I don’t know whether he came to Prandhays because he thought he could take it—Mother bein’ dead and no wizard to go up against Bektis—or because he’d learned somehow there were bits and pieces of their foul machines left hid there, God knows by who, in the deep of time. But the first thing they did was go lookin’ for ’em. And there’s more such things, Bektis says, hid away in Dare’s Keep, though he doesn’t know where—leavin’ aside the fact that anyone with a siege-engine or two could take Prandhays, and Dare’s Keep, if Vair can take it, is near impregnable. If it hadn’t been for me—for Oale Niu, that is—knowing the way of the weapons, I’d be there yet, bein’ …” She checked the angry spill of words, and her hand jerked a little, then patted his thin shoulder as if just remembering that he was there.

  “Bein’ treated bad by every man of his pox-rotted regiment, one at a time or all together in a bunch, the pigs. Don’t think hard on me, sweeting. You’ve got to do what you can.”

  Tir nodded, remembering how he had kissed Vair’s boots and told him he loved him before every man of the camp. “I know,” he said. “But the wizards—the old wizards—didn’t put fire-spells around the camp. They had these round gray rocks in iron holders that threw white light, and they called the—the thing that spits light, they called it chen yekas, not karnach like you do.”

  “Ah,” said Hethya softly. “And what did they call it, under the Ice, that we’re seeking? What was their word for that?”

  Tir said gravely, mischievous for the first time in aching weeks, “Doesn’t Oale Niu know that?”

  She tweaked his hair, hard, like an older sister, or his playmates who were dead. “Don’t you be a clever boots with me, laddy-boy.”

  Even the thought of it chilled the brief happiness he felt at teasing again, playing again, remembering what it used to be like to play. Quietly he said, “Tiyomis. That was their word for the Shadow that Waits at the End of Time.”

  Bektis and Hethya set up the Dark Lightning on the western side of the ice hill and began to carve. The notch grew into a tunnel, steam rushing out in white torrents to innundate the surrounding world in fog, and the stupidest clones were sent to bail out the meltwater that collected as the tunnel grew deep. At the same time the wind eased and changed direction. The cinder-hued roof of cloud fractured. Lakes of green-stained pale sky shone through.

  “There will be a moon tonight,” said the Icefalcon.

  He and his companions had dug a snow-cave in the sprawl of crevasse, ice wall, and dune that crazed the glaciers around three sides of the blister of ice. Scouting in the last of the evening light he’d found signs of the Earthsnake People among the ice and rocks of the rising mountain wall behind; this morning there had been more and, near them, later prints, prints he knew.

  The Talking Stars People. It was difficult to tell much in snowshoes, but he thought he recognized Blue Child’s characteristically long stride. Those deeper prints of massive weight would surely be Red Fox, and always close at his side Stays Up All Night, who had been his strongest supporters against her. She would have sent Spider Music and Eyes In Her Pocket and some others after the horse herd, but most of the peoples of the Real World were wary about invaders in their territory, especially invaders whose intentions were not immediately apparent.

  It was more than a matter of many wagonl
oads of forged-steel southern weapons, though that was a consideration even above horses. They had suffered before, from the incursions of the mud-diggers of various sorts. They would not let themselves be surprised or outflanked again.

  From the top of the ice tower where they sat, the Icefalcon watched Nargois and Sergeant Red Boots set extra guards and confer worriedly with Vair. Bektis remained within the articulated spiral of the Dark Lightning’s cage, like a hermit crab in some fantastic shell. From these, the Icefalcon turned his eyes to the sky, to the guards, to the flawed blue ice. The moon would be in its last quarter tonight, he recalled, but it should rise early and bright.

  “Will the weather hold clear tonight, o my sister?”

  She considered a moment, then nodded.

  “Vair will know that, too,” remarked Loses His Way. He scraped a fingerful of sweetened bison fat from the heel of the rawhide bag and passed the bag along to the others. “He’s expecting an attack, and I don’t think he’ll be disappointed.”

  “Even so,” said the Icefalcon. “They will all be on the watch for the Earthsnake People, or for Blue Child, whose coming, I think, will only help us. I think this may be our chance to get Tir out.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bodiless, the Icefalcon circled the camp.

  He found the Earthsnake People, bivouacked at the mountain’s feet. The jagged terrain concealed their fires and the snow-caves where they awaited the night. The Dark Ones had taken their shaman seven years ago, as they had taken Walking Eyes of the Empty Lakes People, but his amulets were still strong. Bektis would have trouble putting spells of madness or terror on them.

  He saw the Talking Stars People moving in from the higher ground, one by one, Blue Child herself scouting the lead.