Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “It is the Dark we fear here, son. The Dark, and what they might conceivably learn.” The father stepped away from his friend to put a hand on the son’s shoulder. “After I’ve spoken with the other mages at Raendwedth, we’ll see.”

  But the Icefalcon felt Tir’s memory—the memory of stories he’d heard about his own father, his real father, Eldor Andarion, seized and borne away by the Dark Ones to their hellish nests—and after the two men vanished through the right-hand archway, the boy crept stealthily in their wake.

  The northern end of the Keep beyond the Aisle was the headquarters of the Keep’s ruling landchief, containing the chambers where his warriors slept and the rooms where his weavers, potters, smiths, and bakers dwelled with their families and plied their trades. Here—as in Renweth—there were audience chambers great and small, conference halls, even chambers spelled with Runes of Silence against the working of wizardry, which could hold the mageborn prisoners within their walls. There had always, the Icefalcon deduced, been renegade shamans.

  But unlike Renweth, this Keep was new. In Renweth over the countless years, families and clans had broken walls, enlarged cells, put in new stairways to suit their convenience—diverted the water pipes and run conduits off public fountains and latrines, installed false ceilings to create storage lofts, knocked out new doors or blocked old ones up: in general behaved like people making themselves thoroughly at home.

  In the Keep of Dreams, corridors still ran straight and wide. Doorways were uniform and uniformly equipped with wooden louvers—(I’ll have to tell Gil-Shalos all this)—and no pipes ran along the high black ceilings or the walls along the floor.

  No bindweed tangle of ramose chaos; no torches.

  Only glowstones in mesh baskets casting pale clear shadows as mage and warrior entered a cell (fourth on the right after the pillared audience chamber), mounted the spiral stair there, and, in the small conference chamber above, worked a catch behind a sconce on the wall to open a hidden panel.

  They ascended a farther stair, and the boy who was also Tir watched them from below. He was tall enough—barely—to reach and work the lever behind the sconce. The stair was narrow, concealed within a wall, the Icefalcon guessed. He wondered if there were a corresponding route in Renweth and what its goal might be.

  Here the goal was disappointing: a round vestibule entered, and exited again, by two doors that were only the width of a man’s shoulders and barely six feet tall. What seemed to be a long conference hall lay beyond, though there was no table there, no chairs. Its eastern wall contained an archway flanked with frost-white pilasters in whose core seemed to be a half-seen spiral of broken fragments of iron and rock. The archway led through a smaller chamber, likewise bare and likewise giving by a similarly pilastered arch into a third still smaller, and so into a fourth. Fearful of being seen, the boy remained hidden in the gloom of the vestibule, watching his father and the wizard Zay slowly pace the length of the first hall, then pass between the pillars to the second. Their voices were too low to be heard, but he saw Zay gesture, desperate, demanding, his shadow swooping huge over the wall, though what he demanded the boy did not know.

  Around them the Keep slept, secure against the Dark Ones that haunted the lands outside. Tir turned away, afraid to follow further, and descended the secret stair.

  The Icefalcon waited for him at the bottom.

  “Icefalcon!” The boy flung himself at him, sobbing with relief, grabbed him hard around the waist, and pressed his wounded face to his belt knot, clinging as if he’d never let go. “Icefalcon, get me out of here! Get me out of here! They killed Rudy, and Mama’s dead, and they’re going to break into the Keep and kill everyone because Vair thinks there’s more weapons in the Keep, and he needs a place to raise an army that has food and can’t be broken into like Prandhays …”

  “Easy.” The Icefalcon awkwardly stroked at the boy’s dark hair. “Easy.” He had always abhorred weeping children and was uneasily aware that such overwhelming emotion could decant the boy into wakefulness again. It might be hours then before he slept, and the Icefalcon had information to impart, and the cold pain, the ache of concentration, was beginning to saw at his consciousness.

  “Your mother’s not dead. Nor is Rudy, though he was badly hurt.”

  Tir lifted a face wild with hunger and the fear of belief. The Icefalcon felt a cold lance of fury at the man who would put that look into a child’s eyes. “Lord Vair said …”

  “Lord Vair’s a liar.”

  Tir pressed his face to the Icefalcon’s side and again burst into tears.

  “Tir, listen. Listen.” We don’t have time for this. The Icefalcon patted the brittle little shoulder blades and wished Hethya were there.

  And why didn’t she wake Tir if he was sobbing in his sleep? Stupid wench, probably deep in some dream of tupping Ruvis or Mal or Dub or Dare of Renweth or Sergeant Red Boots or the Alketch Cavalry Corps …

  “Tir, listen to me.” The storm seemed to be subsiding. “I’m here to get you out, but you must help me. Can you do that?”

  Tir looked up at him again, wiped his eyes, and nodded.

  “Good boy. I’m separated from my body now—my people call it shadow-walking—but I think I can get you out of this cell. I’m going to leave you now and scout a place outside the Keep where you can hide, a place for me to meet you and a route to get there. Then I’ll return, tell you where to go, and get the guard to let you out.”

  “No,” whispered Tir. “No, Icefalcon, please. Vair …” He stammered a little, as if his throat closed in protest against even forming the name. He swallowed, mopped his cheeks, and made himself go on. “Vair will make me tell. About the stairway. About the rooms. That’s what he’s here for. That’s what he wants.”

  “What lies there?” The Icefalcon’s pale brows knit. He thought he’d had a clear view to the back of the succession of chambers and had seen nothing.

  Tir shook his head violently. “He’ll make me tell,” he whispered. “Bektis will make me tell. There’s a spell they can do … Icefalcon, please.”

  The boy began to tremble and hiccup, and the Icefalcon patted his shoulders again. “Sh-sh. Very well.” He was thinking fast—and in truth, until he knew what Vair intended he did not know how much time he’d have. “How well do you know this Keep? Is there a place on the first level where you can hide? Close enough to the doors that you can get there quickly?”

  Tir nodded. “There’s places Bektis can’t find me. Places magic doesn’t work. Up there”—he pointed up the concealed stairway—“is one of them, but it’s all grown up with plants in real life.”

  “Can you find another such? Good. When I leave you, you must wake and slip away as soon as the guard opens the door. Go quietly, so not to rouse Hethya.”

  “Can Hethya come with me? Icefalcon, please!” he added, feeling the warrior stiffen, and grabbed a handful of wolfskin vest as if he feared the Icefalcon would thrust him away. “She’s sorry, and she hates Vair as much as I do, and she only helped him because she was afraid not to. He’ll hurt her real bad if I run away and she doesn’t. Please.”

  “And if she decides it’s in her best interests that neither of you flee?” He still remembered her in the high Vale, soaked with the clone’s blood and clutching her hair in false terror. Remembered her gazing down at the Keep and declaiming in the voice of Oale Niu.

  “She won’t. Please.” His eyes filled, and he blinked hard to keep them from running over: not a child’s bid for pity, but fear for the sake of one who had been his only comfort. “She helped me, Icefalcon. I can’t leave her.”

  He sighed. This was getting more and more complicated. “Let me speak to the wench.”

  She was dreaming about Ruvis. Or Mal or Dub or goodness knew who else—someone with long blond hair and muscular buttocks. The Icefalcon poked Hethya in the shoulder with his toe. She wriggled out from under and sat up, startled and protesting, hay in her rumpled hair: they were in a barn loft, sometime before
the rising of the Dark. Wide windows opened to night and summer hay, and in the moment before Hethya’s face and body assumed their present-day appearance she seemed no more than a girl of seventeen.

  And beautiful, thought the Icefalcon. Gay and wild as a pony in springtime.

  “You?” she said, clearly discomposed. She frowned. “You’re the one …”

  “Who rescued you in the Vale at the last quarter moon, the more fool I.”

  She scratched hay and flowers out of her hair and pulled up her bodice to cover a sailor’s paradise of breast. Her handsome lover folded away into a trick of the moonlight.

  “I can get you out of the cell,” the Icefalcon said shortly. “Will you go? Tir can lead you to a hiding place while I find a route to get you to hiding outside the Keep the next time they open the Doors. Tir seems to trust you.”

  The lush mouth tightened down hard, and she looked aside. “Poor infant. Poor little child.”

  “Poor child indeed if he’s got only you to guard him,” retorted the Icefalcon, and she looked back at him in a flash of anger. “Or would you rather continue Vair’s doxy?”

  She struck at him, mouth square with anger and teeth bared, and he caught her wrist and twisted her out of his way. She pulled free, rubbing her wrist—in the dream they both had physical form or a very strong illusion of it—banked rage like the dying fires of a burned house in her eyes. “And what choice have I, me lanky boy? To be killed by his troops the way they killed half the other women at Prandhays, after they’d raped the lot of us six ways from the backside of next week? To be made a slave to them or sold to some bandit troop for enough mules and sheep to mount the siege at Renweth and bring His Foulness this far?”

  The Icefalcon asked quietly, “Is that what happened to your mother?”

  “You leave me mother out of this, boy-o.” She looked away, breathing hard, her face half veiled in the tangle of her hair.

  “Me mother died the summer before last,” she said finally. “Or that time of the year that should have been a summer, with the wheat rotten in the stem and us killin’ the very cats for meat. There was fey wicked things in the woods then that killed some in the Keep—two of the little children and one of the herdboys that was Mother’s pupil in spite of all his parents had to say about witches and souls. They killed Mother, too, I think—the things in the woods.”

  She brought up her hand, chewing her thumbnail, red mouth pulled down, ugly and hard.

  “When old Vair and his stinking lot came marching up the road, there wasn’t a great deal to be done nor any to say ’em nay. Her La’ship had made the Keep strong against the Dark Ones, but it’d been broken far back in the days, repaired strong, and broken again—Mother’d found the signs of it all around the walls, she said. It was nothing to Bektis and his putrid crystal Hand.”

  She sighed, looking down while she jerked the laces of her bodice tight. The Icefalcon propped a foot against a winnowing fork and rested his right hand on his sword-hilt. Even as a disembodied spirit within a dream he did not discount the possibility of attack.

  “Mother always said the more we knew of the Keep—the more anybody knew of anything—the better everyone’s chances would be. She’d always studied everything she could lay hand to. When she found all them papers and scrolls and tablets of gold and glass buried in the vaults of the Keep, she wouldn’t rest till she’d read every one. She was like that. I don’t know if you’d understand.”

  “I understand.” The Icefalcon saw again Gil-Shalos’ formidable collection and ink-stained, bandaged fingers.

  “Well, there was a deal of apparatus in the Keep,” Hethya went on. “Things Degendna Marina didn’t tell the Lady Minalde about, and we kept finding more. Men would hunt for it in the vaults and in these sort of tombs in the hills north of Prandhays. Somebody found if you buried bits of it under your fields the insects wouldn’t eat the corn—at least that’s what they claimed. Or that it would draw deer into traps, or put under a mattress would let a man be seven times a hero in bed, though that was wishful thinking so far as I could ever tell. Still, those who found the stuff, for all me mother’s pleading and her La’ship’s orders, they’d break it up and sell the bits to any who’d aught to trade for it: a bit of land that bordered the spring or a cell closer to the fountains or the latrines, or maybe just a fine iron pot. I bought back pieces of it for her, whenever I could. I told her I traded sewing for it.”

  Her eyes met his, steadily, jeeringly, daring him to speak.

  He only said, “Ah.”

  “Well.” She let out her breath. “And for nothing, in the end of it all. Mother had parchments, drawings of these things, and how some of them worked, all written out as far as she could figure ’em, though they could only be worked by wizards. She said a lot of the instructions weren’t clear even at that, or had gone missing over the years.” She waded through the hay to the loft windows, jade moonlight and oceanic dark.

  “Like it?”

  The Icefalcon followed politely. Stubble meadows and neat orchards lay half guessed behind hurdles of withe, fruit gleaming faintly among inky leaves. Sheep grazed the stubble. Somewhere someone played a mandolin; a drum tapped dance rhythms.

  He thought, The heart of mud-digger laziness. But there was pride in her voice.

  “Father loved this farm, put his heart and his sweat and his soul in it. He kept asking me when I’d decide which beau to wed so he could train him up in its management, the way he tried to train me. Poor Dad.”

  She shook her head. “I was too much Mother’s daughter to be a yeoman farmer, but I hadn’t her power. Even all her reading, I just followed what I chose of it, for the fun of the thing. I never knew all those lists of True Names she was after memorizing, nor could tell a sassafras from a dogwood. But when Vair and his boys showed up and started lookin’ about for anyone they could sell, I rolled up my eyes and went into a fit and gave it all to ’em about Oale Niu. She was originally a princess I’d made up stories about, I and me girlfriend Lotis, when we were little—later on I told ’em to me daughter. Lotis was dead by the time Vair came.”

  She looked back over her round white shoulder at him, watching his reaction from under thick lashes. Below them her father’s land lay still and sweet, like the Night River Country before the coming of the Ice.

  Should someone enter his dreams, he wondered, would they walk through the flowering reed beds along the Night River or see otters there playing in the birch-fringed pools?

  “Is that what you were after learning, me bonny iceberg? Who this slut is that lets Vair tell her what to do?”

  “No,” the Icefalcon said, more quietly than he had spoken at first. “What I want to know is, will you hide with Tir in the Keep until I can get you both out? Look after the boy? Not hand him over to Vair to save your own skin?”

  Hethya sighed and pressed her forehead to the wood of the window frame. “ ’Tis madness.” She sounded weary unto death. “He’ll find us in time. He needs the child. Whatever it is the boy knows he won’t be letting him go.”

  “The Keep is large,” said the Icefalcon. “Tir knows it. You don’t happen to know what it is that Vair is so eager to learn?”

  Her head moved again, No. “I’m not so sure the child himself knows, poor little lamb, for all that Bektis was after telling our stinkissimo about the memories of the House of Dare. If their memories were so bloody exact, why didn’t old Eldor remember how they’d put the Dark Ones to rout, instead of lettin’ a thousand men die that could have stayed in Prandhays and kept the bandits away? Liars,” she whispered, shutting her eyes in despair. “All of ’em, liars.”

  Sadness crept into the darkness, the hopeless grief that colored her dream. Far off, as if on the other side of the trees, he saw the reflected glow of flames in the sky and heard the shouting of warriors looting, the screams of women.

  “Will you go with Tir?” he pressed her. “Help him to hide? Not give him over to Vair? You know once Vair’s forced what he wants of
Tir, you’ll just be handed over to the troops again.”

  He felt the flash of her hatred for him, for speaking of it, but he only spoke truth and she knew it. At length she let her breath out in a sigh and said, “Aye. Aye, friend ghost, you open that door for us and I’ll do it. How much worse can matters get?”

  The Icefalcon forbore to enlighten her on that head and said only, “Good. Wake now, and wake the boy. By the next time you sleep I’ll have scouted a way through the warriors outside.”

  The Icefalcon’s one fear, as he stepped through the desiccated wood of the door, was that the clone had succumbed to possession of demons or that he had been joined by another man. There were demons in the corridor, tiny floating lights that sometimes had the appearance of eyes, and a cold and sluggish elemental of some kind, hissing and whispering in a circle around the warrior and reaching out to pinch his toes. He was one—the Icefalcon remembered—of a clone group of thirteen, and by the dull glaze of the man’s eyes the Icefalcon guessed he wasn’t far from a state of permanent dream. In any case it shouldn’t be difficult to step into the dreaming halls of that vacant awareness.

  Nor was it. At the last instant before going in the Icefalcon smelled what was in there, but it was too late to stop: he should have realized, he thought, that having no mind to speak of, the clone would recall its only memory.

  Pain. Over, and over, and over.

  As when the demons ripped his flesh, it did little good for the Icefalcon to tell himself that this was illusion, and somebody else’s illusion at that. The pain drowned him, a vat of fire and worse than fire: blinding, specific, agonizing. The pain of the skin bursting at every needle’s entry point and peeling slowly back. The pain of every sinus and cavity of the skull bloating up with blood until the membranes burst. The pain of every nerve-fiber outlining itself in scalding heat, searing into a pain-ghost strong enough to reduplicate its image down to the smallest screaming shred of oozing flesh …