Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  To the nearest guard, Vair snapped out an order, flapping a hand at Hethya: “Cia’ak will go with you while you select a suitable room for yourself and the child. Qinu …” He signaled up another man, rapped out words in the ha’al, the Icefalcon hearing (he thought) clothing and bed. This was something on which he had not counted, and after a moment’s hesitation, he followed the guard into the passage once again. More men entered, hacking at the vines with axes and dragging great mats of them not out, but in toward the Aisle.

  At the outer end of the ice tunnel the messenger spoke to Nargois, who waited with a great crowd of clones bearing axes, torches, bundles of weapons and gear. The elderly second nodded and began to issue orders. The Truth-Finder detailed men to the largest of the wagons and instructed the clones in unshipping the vat and its accompanying equipment. The expedition’s priest, with his servant and three clones, bore down the tunnel the portable altar and velvet-draped equipment deemed necessary for the approval of the Straight God.

  It was at this point—though the dim slice of moon still lingered well below the hills—that the camp was attacked.

  The first person to be aware of the attack was Nargois, one moment giving instructions to the perimeter guards—he, too, seemed confident that the attack would come with moonrise—the next moment looking down with widening eyes at the brown-feathered arrow sticking out of his diaphragm, as if he could not believe what he saw. A second arrow went through his throat under his left ear, probably before he was aware of any pain from the first, and then the Earthsnake People and the Talking Stars People were in the wagon circle.

  Sergeant Red Boots shouted an alarm, dove behind the cage of the Dark Lightning issuing commands, and battle was locked. A stray arrow went through the Icefalcon’s chest, a weird cold wickering that caused no pain. Demons flickered and danced in the fog-wraiths that haloed the torches and billowed pale underfoot. Mules shrieked and dragged their leads, Alketch warriors and wolf-silent Raiders dragging them in two directions. Clones grabbed up provisions and dashed for the tunnel while another sergeant tried to organize a defended retreat; arrows felled them, and fur-clothed shadows caught up the bundled swords, axes, and armor they bore and wrenched the weapons from their dying hands. The priest came out of the ice tunnel and cried something, and a demon-ridden clone raced up to him, shrieking, and sank an ax into his chest.

  Blue Child axed Red Boots through the shoulder against the Dark Lightning’s cage, took a sword-thrust in the double hide of her jacket, and slashed the man’s face open with her knife. Her followers and his were running to join battle—she kicked the man out of the way in a spray of blood and swung herself into the Dark Lightning’s cradle, laying her hands on the glass ball at its center in the way that showed she’d been watching Bektis all the time.

  The Icefalcon knew Blue Child was incapable of activating the apparatus, but he was the only one that wise in the ways of magic. Every southern warrior of the dozen closing in hesitated—and every one was taken in that hesitation by one of Blue Child’s band, with the neatness of dancers in a cabaret.

  The Earthsnake People had made their appearance by this time, slithering under the wagons out of the snowy dark. Some killed, others only seized whatever weapons they could. Though they were still outnumbered by the clones, the combined forces of the two Peoples proved sufficient to force the southerners from the wagon circle. Torches toppled in the snow, the dimming light adding to the confusion. Men hauled whatever weapons and provisions they could down the tunnel, the circle of defenders shrinking around it, hampered by the possessed clones in their own ranks.

  The Icefalcon raced down the ice tunnel through a melee of fog and torchlight, flying arrows and struggling men, feeling as if he were in a dream, except that his dreams seldom featured anything so weird as that glimmering corridor of mists. He could not communicate with Tir, but should the boy be enterprising enough to chance an escape in the confusion, he wanted at least to be by his side.

  Near the Keep’s Doors he met Vair na-Chandros, dark face twisted with rage as he shouted orders and lashed with his whip at the men struggling past him under their burdens. Bektis scurried in the generalissimo’s wake, wrapped so thick in spells of protection against anyone’s notice he was to all intents and purposes invisible. But to the Icefalcon’s bodiless consciousness the ward-spells, guard-spells, arrows-miss, and calamities-hit-someone-else appeared as a fluttering mass of plasmoid light, and the old man, clutching frantically at the crystal Device strapped to his hand, had the appearance of a demon-fish of the southern seas, which attaches seaweed ribbons to itself in order to increase its bulk and pass for a being too formidable to eat.

  He would, the Icefalcon guessed, barely have the concentration to throw illusion, confusion, fear, or much of anything else at the attackers, so desperate was he to remain unseen. As well, he thought. He would not like to lose someone like Red Fox to a jackal like the Court Mage.

  The Aisle was a madhouse, men throwing down their burdens, snatching up weapons, running back up the tunnel. No sign of Tir or Hethya, but among the men, demons buzzed, shrieking and dodging when someone ran past with a demon-scare. Booted men and other clones were killing the possessed clones systematically, like men butchering rabid animals; five or six lay bleeding about the floor, the demons that had been in them romping madly in the jungles that dangled down the walls, shaking the vines and screaming with laughter.

  The Icefalcon thrust aside the cold embrace of a demon that, unnervingly, took the shape of Dove in the Sun and fell upon him, weeping and biting; he felt the pain of the bites but knew it wasn’t real. The pain of seeing her face again wasn’t real, either, or so he told himself. Tracks in the creepers showed him where people had gone, through a door at the front end of the Aisle, into the caliginous passageways that in the Renweth Keep would have been first level north.

  A corridor curtained with a tapestry of pallid vines and fungus like cobwebs; a slit of torchlight limning a door. Ancient wood, but still stout. Cold Death had told him it was dangerous to tamper with the shape his consciousness told him it wore, but he had passed through tent curtains and wagon-tops without trouble, and the wood proved no more difficult.

  Hethya and Tir were inside.

  The ax-wielding warrior was still with them, one of the booted men, long black hair hanging loose around a brown face and profound uneasiness in his eyes. Tir and Hethya sat on their blankets, looking around. Cold Death had told him that it was possible for a shadow-walker to enter dreams, and in fact his original intent had been to scout the camp and wait until Tir fell asleep, then brief him on the lay of the ground, and how they should meet, in a dream.

  But the boy clung close in Hethya’s arms, wide eyes staring past the dim glow of the little hemp-oil lamp, listening to the distant clamor in the Aisle. Hethya murmured, “There’s no need to fear, sweeting,” and pushed back his hood from his forehead and stroked his hair. The Icefalcon saw that she was in truth a handsome woman. Though there was the hardness in her eyes of someone who has been had by a hundred bandits, there was neither cruelty nor spite.

  “I’m not afraid.” Tir shook as if with bitter cold.

  “You know these Keeps were built all alike, with but the one set of Doors. And even were they not, it’s all buried under the ice, you know. All this”—she gestured about her, to the lichens that padded the wall and the ceiling, the lianas coiled at the base of the walls like the shed skins of serpents—“all this looks creepy enough, to be sure, but it’s just plants, and mostly dead ones at that. They must have grown up from the tanks in the crypts, as you were telling me of, back at your own home Keep. There’s naught in it to fear.”

  His lips formed the word no without sound.

  “He’s a snake and a beast, our Vair, but he’ll not be lettin’ aught befall us so long as he needs us—and need us he does still. There’s a secret yet here in this Keep that he’s after finding, a secret he says’ll get him back into power in the South, and him that fu
rious at his wife that she drove him out.”

  Her voice sank to a whisper, though it was clear the guard knew no Wathe. “You just go on doin’ as I’ve done, me honey. Lead him along, that there’s always one more secret to find. As for this …” Her voice grew stronger again, and she shrugged.

  “That old fraud Bektis is fond enough of his own skin, and he listened deep, to every sound and whisper, before puttin’ foot through those Doors. You can trust he’d have heard anything bigger than a mouse. When all’s said it’s naught but an empty building.”

  Tir closed his eyes, and a shudder passed through him; for a long time he said nothing. Then, “No.”

  “No what, lambkin?”

  He shook his head, his mouth set, trying not to show fear. His voice was barely to be heard. “Not empty.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  From the Keep of Shadow, the Icefalcon passed into the Keep of Dreams.

  Prandhays Keep, he thought, and looked about him at the walls of wood and wattle, stained bright yellows and oranges under centuries of torch smoke and grime. They had glowstones there, more than at Dare’s Keep, and the decayed chambers whose arches and doorways and internal windows looked into one another like a warren of coral were brightly lit. The chamber in Hethya’s dream was nearly as brilliant as daylight.

  Hethya’s mother was there. How the Icefalcon knew this woman was Hethya’s mother he wasn’t sure. Perhaps the knowledge was part of walking in someone else’s dream. Her eyes had the look of Hethya’s, green-gold and tip-tilted, and her hair had once been the same cinnamon hue. Even faded as it was, it retained the curly strength and weight, piled in random rolls on her head and bristling with sticks of wood and metal to keep it out of her way. She was beautiful like Hethya, but thin.

  “They’re fools,” she said. “Idiots!” Like Hethya she used her hands when she spoke. “They should be learning about these things, not trying to figure out how to extract the magic from them to heat their rooms or make their little vegetable patches grow! That wasn’t what these things were made for!”

  “Well, Mother,” pointed out Hethya, “we don’t know what they were made for.”

  She was younger then and trimmer, and there was a lightheartedness in her eyes that had disappeared over the intervening years. The yellow silk gown she wore was new enough that the Icefalcon guessed she dreamed of a time six or seven years ago, the Time of the Dark or just after it. She had a child on her knee, a year or two old, dark-haired and green-eyed, reaching with round pink hands to snatch at the braid she dangled in play as she spoke.

  “We know why some were made.” Hethya’s mother flicked with the backs of her fingers at the pile of scrolls on the desk before her: heaps of them, tablets and codexes and books. Gil-Shalos, thought the Icefalcon, would perish with envy at the sight. “Most of this is rot, rubbish, but some of it, my girl … Some of it has told me some most interesting things.”

  “Such as?” Hethya hoisted the child on her hip and crossed the cell to stand by her mother’s chair. For a time the two women studied the scrolls with heads together, the child grasping and reaching for the older woman’s hair-sticks, the resemblance clear between the three dissimilar faces. In the corners of the cell, and through the archways and half cells and vestibules opening from it, the Icefalcon glimpsed dim half-familiar shapes: the sections of canopy that had been over the iron vat in the wagon, the half-assembled midpart of the Dark Lightning’s cradle. There was a black stone table in one of the vestibules that the Icefalcon recognized, such a table as Ingold and Gil-Shalos used to read the smoky polyhedrons that held the records of the Times Before.

  If bandits had taken Prandhays Keep, the Icefalcon could guess what had become of that child, what had become of Hethya as well.

  When the armies of humankind were being raised for an assault on the Dark, Ingold and Alde had both sent to Degedna Marina, landchief of the Felwoods, begging for all and any machinery or relics of the Times Before, for any mageborn they could find. Degedna Marina had dispatched a small force of her warriors—and those of her lesser lords—but denied finding such mechanisms in any of the three Felwoods Keeps. No wizards, she said, dwelled among those who survived.

  Hethya straightened up, began a sort of dance with her child on her hip to make the toddler laugh. She stopped at the sound of a sharp scratching by the cell’s curtained door, called out gaily, “I’m coming, Ruvis.”

  “Ruvis, is it?” Her mother looked up, exasperated, amused. “Mal Buckthorn just brought you back here an hour ago!”

  “Shh! Ruvis’ll hear you!”

  But her mother had kept her voice down, evidently knowing her daughter well. Hethya put the child in a cradle wrought of forest twigs and ancient goldwork, tucked it up with a sheepskin and a bright-patched quilt, and said, “You be me good, little dumplin’, till I return, me peach, me blueberry.” She checked a mirror, readjusting the jeweled comb in her hair. “Dub Waterman’s coming by for me around midnight, Mother. If so be he gets here before I get back, tell him I’ve gone out for a few minutes to fetch you some lampblack from Oggo Peggit in the Back Warrens and I’ll be right back …”

  Her mother rolled her eyes, “You are incorrigible.” But she laughed as she said it and kissed her and tousled her hair. And because this was a dream the Icefalcon felt Hethya’s sorrow and the pain of her loss and knew the grown Hethya, the woman Hethya, wept in her sleep.

  He stepped away from her, back into the Keep of the End of Time.

  They lay together in their cell, Hethya and Tir, the child snuggled in the woman’s arms. The earlier guard had been replaced by a clone, who sat just outside the shut and bolted oak panels, staring indifferently at the dirty torchlight on the opposite wall. Only the thinnest fuzz of hair covered his scalp, but what was unmistakably a patch of wool grew from his cheek.

  Within the cell, an oil lamp burned, a grimy fleck of fire in the close-crowding shadows. Tir, too, dreamed of a Keep.

  Not Dare’s Keep, not the Keep the mage Brycothis had surrendered her human life to enter as Heart-Mage and core. The Icefalcon recognized the Keep of the Shadow, though the vast Aisle was cleared to its rear wall and the light of glowstones outlined from within a patchwork of balconies, open archways, winding staircase, and a rose window like the lost sun of summer. The streams on the black stone floor spoke with gentle music; the voices of the men who walked there echoed very softly, like single pebbles dropped into still ponds.

  Tir was there. Sometimes he looked like Tir—Tir worn to his bones, sunken eyes desperate in a scarred face—and sometimes he looked like someone else, a sturdy boy just coming into adolescence, with the dark-gray eyes of the House of Dare and black hair growing unevenly out of what had been a close crop. He walked in the wake of two men and looked about him as he walked.

  One was a burly middle-aged warrior whose initial pug-faced ugliness had been recently augmented by scars and burns. The Icefalcon recognized the wounds. He carried such marks on his chest, right arm, and hand from the acid and fire of the Dark Ones. Most adults in the Keep did. The other man was small and fine-boned, his shaved skull illuminated with the intricate tattooing that Gil-Shalos said was the mark of a mage in the Times Before.

  “I know you weren’t ready for this,” said the scar-faced warrior. “But with Fyanach’s death I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “No,” the mage said in a voice that could have been contained in the smallest of pottery jars. “No. And I understood there was the possibility when I assented to come.” But there was stricken pain in his eyes. He was fair-skinned and, like his friend’s, his face and scalp and tattoo-written hands were crossed with burn scars and the pink, brittle flesh of acid scalds, the track of battle against the Dark Ones. “Will they ever know?” he asked.

  “Some will.” They weren’t speaking in the Wathe, or the ha’al, or any tongue the Icefalcon had ever heard. He knew his understanding of it came only through Tir, who remembered in his dream. “It’s not a knowledge ma
ny share, even at Raendwedth.”

  The name meant Eye of the Heart—the capacity to read a person or situation clearly—coupled with the locative for mountains; the Icefalcon hadn’t known that was the derivation of Renweth Vale’s name. “There have been too many corrupt wizards, too much evil magic. Too many hate magic on principle now, and small blame to them. So it’s not a knowledge that can be shared. But some will always know, down through the years. Your name—and what you do—will not be forgotten. That I promise you, Zay, my friend.”

  “I do not … want to be forgotten.” Zay rubbed his chest, half unconsciously, as if to massage away some cold or grief. “And Lé-Ciabbeth?”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  The great clock spoke, hard leaden chimes that flattened on the air.

  “She’ll want to come here,” said the scar-faced man after a time. “I’ll detail warriors to escort her, as soon as they can be spared.”

  “No.” Zay stopped and caught his companion’s arm, desperation in his face. “Too long.”

  He led the ugly man across a succession of footbridges, down the vast plain of the floor, through a silence that diminished their footfalls to a thrush peck against rock, then up the double stairway that curved to a pillared door at the Aisle’s inner end. In the Keep of Renweth the territory at the end of the Aisle on the first level belonged to the Church and that above to the Lady of the Keep.

  The two men stopped again at the top of the stair, on the threshold of a triple archway. “You’d best go back, son,” said the warrior, speaking to Tir. “In time you’ll know this secret, but now is not the time.”

  “But something might happen to you, Father.” Tir spoke in the cracking voice of adolescence, and indeed as he spoke he wore the form of that other boy, in his black kilt all stamped with stylized eagles of gold. “Isn’t that why you brought me? So I’d know, in case the Dark …?”