Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)
Page 25
Demons fed on the magic buried deep in the walls of the Keep. Knockings and murmurings filled the darkness. Climbing the stairs that Tir had climbed in his dreams, traversing passageways knee-deep in dead black brittle vines that made not a sound under his shadowy feet, the Icefalcon heard them. Lights flickered among the choking plugs of lichen and fungus, glistened on the beards of icicles that depended from cracked ceilings and broken fountains. In the Aisle, or in those chambers where the clones stacked weapons and food, small objects would sometimes rise up and fling themselves against the walls. One man ran shrieking into the corridor, striking at something no one else could see as the marks of teeth appeared in his cheeks and hands.
The Icefalcon moved on. The chambers that had been clear in Tir’s dream, behind the triple archway and the rose windows on the Aisle’s northeastern wall, were an impassable bolus of mutant groundnut and squashes through which he slipped like water.
Vair will make me lead him there, Tir had said.
But why?
The hall of the crystal pillars was dead to magic and clear of the encroachment of vegetation. So was the round vestibule with its tiny doors—from whom did they expect an attack this deep in the center of the Keep? The Dark Ones could change size at will. Another chamber close by, spherical and small, a round lens of heavy crystal in one wall that showed the hall of the pillars—the Icefalcon looked but could see no Rune of Silence worked into its doors or walls. Something that by its leaves had once been a bean plant had filled most of one wall with clinging runners and the floor with a mulch of stinking decay.
A guardroom?
The clock chimed dimly in the distance. Warily, the Icefalcon passed through the vestibule’s door, and despite the pain that grew steadily in him, the ache and coldness that more and more threatened to swamp his concentration, he felt also the tenseness of danger, the sense of something waiting for him in the dark.
Waiting, he thought, for a long time.
But even the eyes of shadow that could see demons saw nothing amiss. Bare black walls, bare black floor. From the door he had a clear view through all the archways to the end of the succession of ever-shrinking rooms, and all were bare to the walls. To the best of his recollection it had been so in Tir’s dream.
Or had he, the Icefalcon, shadow-walker and interloper, seen only part of the child’s dreaming memory?
Had there been something in that final chamber, hidden behind the two men whose shadows lurched across the walls?
Or did he dream, too, now?
He walked the length of the great chamber, passed between the crystal pilasters, crossed the smaller room behind. A sound made him turn, but there was nothing. Only the blank ebon walls.
More slowly he walked on, and from somewhere he heard the thread of someone whistling—a phrase of music, then silence.
A smaller room, crystal pillars, a chamber smaller yet. Beyond another arch another chamber, dark and tiny and anonymous; another arch. The cold in the core of his mind was almost overwhelming, icy panic and growing darkness, and a sense that he trod where he should not tread.
Go back.
Go back or die.
Was it his ancestors who spoke to him? Black Hummingbird, who had first slept on the slopes of Haunted Mountain, to hold the shell and the iron flower that let him hear the voices of the Stars? One of the Dream Things—the Flowered Caterpillar or the Mouse’s Child—that sometimes lied and sometimes told the truth? Or something in the blackness, something that was trying to keep him from this final secret, the secret Tir had begged not to be forced to reveal?
It seemed to him that more crystal pilasters glittered before him, a double line of them. Surely there had been only four rooms, three archways? He counted three or four more before him, and a guessing of others beyond.
A trap?
A man sat in the darkness before him, a little to one side of the next arch.
There was something very wrong with the darkness, something amiss about the shape and perception of that chamber and the next. Voices seemed to be murmuring all around him, a mutter of anger, desperation, and a loneliness that had long ago plunged over the black edge of abyssal madness.
Go back. Go back right now.
The man before him stood. “Nyagchilios?” He spoke his true name, the name of the pilgrim-falcon in the tongue of the Talking Stars. “Icefalcon?”
The Icefalcon retreated, terror of a trap flaring in him, a trap whose nature he could not even guess. But he knew, as surely as he knew the name the man had said, that if he lingered even another few moments he would be caught in some unguessable doom. Carefully, never turning his back, he edged away, through chamber after chamber, toward the door.
The man—or illusion, he wasn’t sure which—took a step or two after him, then stopped. But the Icefalcon could see him between the pilasters as he retreated, see him clearly in the dark: the broad shoulders beneath a ragged mantle of brown wool, the close-cropped white beard and the face gouged with scars and creases and laugh lines. Blue eyes that hid terrible knowledge under wise brightness, like sunlight on the well at the cosmos’ heart.
If any illusion could have called him into the gullet of a snare, thought the Icefalcon, it would have been that one. Because of all people he could have summoned to his aid, the first on his list would certainly have been Ingold Inglorion.
The second chime sounded as the Icefalcon emerged from the narrow door of the vestibule. He hastened down the hidden stair, passed like a fleeting ghost through the jungle of vines. It was in his mind to make a detour and fetch Tir and Hethya, but aside from the fact that they would undoubtedly still be awake, it would do them little good to walk straight into the arms of Bektis. Who he needed now, he thought, was Cold Death. There had to be a way to send warning to Blue Child and her band that the illusion of the hunt they pursued would lead them to disaster. Possibly Cold Death knew it already.
The Doors stood open. Lamps gleamed in the dense white mists of the passage, in the ice tunnel that stretched beyond. The cold there cut his brain like a knife, but he welcomed it: he was out of the Keep, out of the trap of its walls, running now for the sleeping flesh of his body like a jack hare running for his burrow, with the glowing hounds of hell coming behind.
The bright glare of morning smote him.
He was free.
Another war band coming up, he thought. Some scouting or hunting party that had cut the trail of the Earthsnake People and followed to see what hunting they sought in the Ice in the North.
What hunting indeed?
He would not, he thought, pausing, be able to see them once he returned to his flesh.
It was dangerous, the tearing and weight of exhaustion and pain tightening on him like the tightening of the torture boot or the rack.
Still, he was going to be coming back this way in his human flesh to lead Tir and Hethya to freedom. After a moment’s thought, the Icefalcon flung himself skyward, flying the way Gil-Shalos—and long ago Dove in the Sun—had told him that they flew in dreams.
The ice dropped away below him. Seracs reared like fortresses, arêtes and nunataks traced in black the shape of buried mountains behind the green-white blister of the ice. Higher the Icefalcon rose, through a gray mistiness that almost hid the land. It would be easy, he thought, to become lost here, to become lost entirely from his body. To rise and rise, above all cloud, until his soul united with sun and air.
He understood suddenly that the pain and cold and loneliness he felt were the result of trying to hold the shape of the body that lay somewhere in the Ice. The terror and suffocation would last only as long as he clung to the memory of that shape, clung to the illusion of lungs and heart, the intention of returning to that abandoned flesh. Indeed, they were nearly unbearable now. If he embraced the sunlight and the air, he would be free.
Or was that another illusion of the demons of the air?
He looked about him, as his namesake would look about for the white hares of the ice.
To the west he saw Blue Child’s band—nowhere near any crevasse—and among the rock ridges southeast of the Keep’s bubble the dark ragged assemblage of the Earthsnake People. Far off, coming up from the south on the trails left by the others, was the new band, well over two hundred strong. The Icefalcon flew toward them, effortless as a silver rag of cloud. From the air he recognized Breaks Noses, younger brother to Loses His Way, war leader of the Empty Lakes People. Bundled thick in double-sewn fur and mammoth wool, others followed him: Buttonwillow, Spindle, and Doesn’t Bathe. The friends and kin of Loses His Way. And with them Beautiful Girl, the mother of Twin Daughter—the wife of Loses His Way.
Cold raked him, tearing his attention, shredding his mind. Terror swamped him, and he was falling again, plunging toward the white and blue and black of the broken ice. Gray things and darkness clotted his sight and the laughter of the winds his hearing.
Elementals.
It was hard now to pull his attention away, hard to fight clear of the terror, to remember that he had no bones to break. He couldn’t breathe, and weariness rent him beyond bearing. He saw the shadow-form of his hands and arms that had once been clothed in wolf-hide tunic, in the appearance he knew, torn tatters of ripped clothing, flesh gone and bones bare from biceps to wrist. Something like a vast spider of cloud and ice-fog clawed out his entrails, and he could not think his body whole again. Elementals vast as mammoths walked over the snow below him like pond-skimmers, waiting for him to land.
Go away. Go away. Go away.
He leveled out a few feet above the snow, hearing them like swarming bees above his head. A flying tangle of shreds and bones, he skimmed the broken whiteness, dodged between hummocks and ridges, seeking the crevasse where his body lay. The thoughts of the air and the brilliant, hurting sunlight frightened him now, and he found himself crying for the comforting armor of muscle and bone.
Voices below, cold and hard as the shattering of glass. A bellowed war cry and the clash of steel. Light exploding among the gashes in the ice, and columns of steam, hard and nearly tactile, marble and diamonds and then gray, all-choking fog.
Dread such as he had never known slammed his heart.
He dropped to the ice at the head of the crevasse, leaped down the jagged blocks as though possessed again of human legs and human muscles. Tracks of booted feet marred the snow before him, booted feet and those bound in rawhide. Another levin-bolt and the crack of thunder, another billow of steam. The Icefalcon raced between the narrow sapphire walls, hearing a man curse in the choking mists. “Little bitch got away.”
No, thought the Icefalcon. No.
“Don’t kill that one.” He heard Crested Egret’s voice as he came around the projecting shoulder of ice and saw four or five clones holding the struggling, thrashing Loses His Way, dragging him down with their sheer weight. Two clones lay dead in the crumble of snow, and a third sat bowed over, his back to the frozen wall, numbly clutching his belly.
Bektis emerged from the fog, stuffing his chilblained hand, the Hand of Harilómne still flashing on his fingers, into an ermine muff. The smoke of a heat-spell surrounded him, mingling white with the general vapors as he scrambled down from where the deeper gash of the chasm narrowed and ascended. He was panting and looked put out. Even his beard was mussed. “You should have those guards of yours flogged,” he snapped at the little officer. “The fools let her slip by!”
Crested Egret’s expression did not change. “I’ll see it done, Lord sorcerer.” He had a prim voice—he was one of the Alketch who, like Vair, had kept up shaving even in the wilds and battles of the North. “Which of them failed you?”
Bektis hesitated a moment, looking from man to man of those standing near, then said, “That one, that one, and that one,” pointing—at random, the Icefalcon thought. Two of the men looked startled and angry; the other, a clone, seemed barely aware that he’d been singled out. Before anything further could be said someone called out, “Here’s another!”
No. No. No.
Steam still poured in a misty river from the ice-cave where they’d spent … last night? The night before? Two clones emerged dragging something. Loses His Way flung himself against his captors like a chained bull and bellowed.
They were carrying the Icefalcon’s body.
“Dead, sir,” said one of the clones. The Icefalcon knew those words from his time in the South.
“Your little pretty-boy, is it?” another added in a kind of mixed dialect as Loses His Way wrenched at the hands that held him. “Not bad,” said someone else, or something along those lines; there was crude laughter and jostling.
Crested Egret silenced them with a couple of flat, yapped orders, and they bound Loses His Way, not without difficulty, and slung the Icefalcon’s body on the sledge with the two dead clones and the wounded man. All the men worked together to drag the sledge back out of the crevasse, slipping and skidding and falling on the ice.
No. The Icefalcon was trembling, or would have been, he thought, had he flesh to tremble in. He ran back along the mist-drowned crevasse, seeking Cold Death—meltpools and scars, blue as glass, showed where Bektis had struck at her with the lightning of his crystal Hand, which had evidently been designed for single combat and spells rather than armies or groups. But of Cold Death herself he could find nothing.
The fog was thick here, and demons slipped like lampreys from the ice walls, reaching out to him with thin white hands of pain.
Cold Death! He tried to call his sister’s name. Cold Death!
But there was nothing. Frantic, he turned and ran after Bektis and the retreating guards through the bloodstained snow to the blue tunnel, keeping as far behind them as he dared. Hurting, shaken, and more frightened than he had ever been, he saw before him the black Doors of the Keep framing torchlight within. The dead chime of the clock reached out to meet him, and as the warriors dragged their booty through—living and dead and one body that was not quite either—the Icefalcon slipped in after them and heard the Doors shut again behind.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Huh,” said Hethya. “So it’s yourself again.”
She’d been dreaming about her daughter and the forest Keep. Dreaming about the rooms that had been carved off the crypts in those long years between the time when the Dark Ones had returned to their underground realms and the time when the forest Keeps had ceased to be fortresses with the return of order and the rule of the High Kings of Gae.
She’d been playing hide-and-seek with her child while her scholar mother investigated the caches of long-buried junk at the bottom of those twisty wooden stairs: hibernant glowstones gone dark with time, old chests of brown brittle scrolls, broken furniture and hidden doorways concealing still-deeper fastnesses, still-more-curious treasures. Her daughter could only toddle but staggered with a child’s blithe tumbledown delight among the shadowy warrens, barely illuminated by the lamps that Hethya and her mother bore; her laughter was gay in the dark.
But with the Icefalcon’s appearance in the crypts of Prandhays Keep Hethya transfigured once more to a woman of thirty, a little blowsy, a little haggard, with bitter eyes and the dirty hair of one who has traveled far and hard. She put her hands on her hips, and leaned her back against a plastered archway, and asked, “And what is it you’ll be wanting now?”
It was hard to speak the words. “Your help,” he said. “Please.”
The Icefalcon took her hand—his own no more than shreds of flesh clinging to white bone—and led her across into the Shadow Keep, dark tunnels cancerous with fungus and strange white ivies. He was very cold now, disoriented and weary beyond speaking, every wound and gash giv
en him by the demons of the misty air open, bleeding, weakening him; drawing away his concentration from the task of keeping bone and flesh clear in his memory. The sun kept coming back into his mind, and the free flight in the air, the desire to dissolve and to sleep.
He was beginning to realize that he might not make it back to his body. If it were destroyed he knew he would not last long but did not know what would become of him in that event.
“Did you find a way out?” asked Hethya. A reasonable request, but in his weariness he felt a flash of dull rage at her, a desire, unprecedented in his experience, to strike her across the face.
“No.” It was unworthy of a person of the Talking Stars—and also a pointless expenditure of energy—to show anger. Also, he would not give her that. So he kept his voice neutral. “I was unable to leave the Keep until the Doors opened, and then I found Bektis had encountered Cold Death: she fled from him, I know not where. Here.”
There was a guard outside the door of the triple cell where the vat and its horrors had been set up, one of the very few that still possessed a solid door. The corpses of the slain had been dragged there and heaped in a corner; bundled bales of dead foliage and whatever else could be gathered: fungus, the last of the wood, a dead mule. A new, stout bar had been slotted into the makeshift sockets on the door, though the Icefalcon knew that Loses His Way was bound. Had he not been, the wood, long dehydrated in the cold, might not have held him.
Because it was a dream the Icefalcon passed easily through the thick wood, and Hethya stepped gamely behind.
“Faith!” she whispered, shocked.
Not, the Icefalcon was certain, because of the bodies. Anyone who had passed through the Time of the Dark had seen bodies, in all stages of decomposition and ruin. Certainly this woman had seen worse if she’d watched the making of the clones. Even the fact that the clones had begun to decay in the warmth of the Keep was something she already knew. She went over to where the Icefalcon’s own body lay on the pile, forehead and eyelids smudged with the remains of Cold Death’s ward-spells, and touched his face, something the Icefalcon found extremely disturbing.