Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  The terror was like a blow over the heart.

  “Come on.” Hethya glanced over her shoulder at the open door, stuck the torch in a wall sconce, and crouched to slap the still face. “Wake up, boy-o, there’s a good lad. Open your eyes, curse your lizard-eating heart …”

  “He is dead,” Loses His Way mumbled through puffed purple lips. “A shaman cursed him to his death, cursed his flesh and everything it touches …”

  “That’s not the story his ghost told me in me dreams, handsome.”

  Loses His Way’s blue eyes flared, caught between astonishment, hope, and suspicion; Hethya was already cutting the cord that stretched down his back, fumbling in the guard’s coat pockets for the key to the spancels.

  “He says he’ll be able to get back into his body, not that I think he can do it without a good dollop of witchery for a shoehorn. Me mother was always on about idiots thinkin’ there wasn’t a thing to magic but sayin’ the words of a spell.” She pulled the chains away and thrust her shoulder under that of Loses His Way as the warrior tried to rise and stumbled, limbs cramped and feeble from the binding and the beating he had undergone. “Can you help me get him out of here?”

  “Where?”

  Remind me never to put you in charge of my horses, thought the Icefalcon in disgust. You’d trust a demon who pointed out a waterhole.

  Loses His Way tried to pick up the Icefalcon’s limp body and staggered, dropping it to the floor—

  Thank you very much. When I get back into my bones, I’ll find half of them broken.

  “I’ll take him—no, I know how to carry a man. Next room along, gather as much of the clothes and gear as you can, boy-o—you know how to get in touch with this sister of his? This shaman that served him his eviction to begin with?”

  Loses His Way shook his head. “She fought this Wise One Bektis and his gem of lightning but was driven back, burned by his fires; hurt, I think.”

  Hethya cursed and manhandled the Icefalcon’s body up across her shoulders. “Well, we’ll just have to do what we can. There’s no chance he’s off waitin’ elsewhere for us, is there?”

  “Were it me, I would not.”

  They stepped into the corridor, Hethya watching nervously in both directions while Loses His Way gathered up clothing from the other room, then made their way swiftly down the first crossing passage that would take them out of the general area, shadows lurching in the torchlight in their wake. The Icefalcon was filled with a kind of fascinated dread at the sight of his own face cold and slack against Hethya’s shoulder, his own braids dangling down, the scarred arms and calves loose and lifeless. Twice he came near, reaching into the flesh, and twice stepped back, defeated, alien, and desperately frightened.

  Like a ghost he could only follow, in the shadows behind the torch’s light.

  The old man was there.

  Huddled beside the bead of lamplight, Tir felt him, out there in the corridor, waiting.

  The room was safe. It had been spelled against the scrying of wizards, and the spells held true against other things as well.

  But he was there.

  Closing his eyes, Tir looked down into memories, as if looking into a well, though whether they were his own or the old man’s he didn’t really know.

  The long-haired warrior, the man that other boy had called “Father,” stood before the chair where the old man sat. They were back in the chambers with the crystal pillars: the third chamber, which came right before the fourth one that was so shallow it was barely a niche.

  The old man he had seen in his visions of the caravan train, the old man who had been one of those to set out the flares against the Dark Ones. The magelight feather above the aged wizard’s head gleamed on the blue patterns of his scalp, the heavy overhang of his tall brow, the questing jut of nose. He looked up, and Tir could not see other than shadow in the sockets of his eyes.

  Gently, Tir’s father said, “It’s time, Zay.”

  Zay made no reply.

  Tir’s father licked his lips. “We can’t wait any longer.” His long hair was dressed up in a comb, black with garnets that glinted like droplets of blood.

  “No.” The old man’s mouth formed the words, but there was no sound to them. His sigh, though not great, was louder, like the tearing loose of the soul from its moorings in flesh. “Just … till morning comes. Please.”

  “We’ll take the road in the morning,” said Tir’s father, and Zay looked up at him more sharply, hearing something in his words beyond what he said. “There is no other way,” the long-haired warrior went on. “As long as we know so little of the magic of the Dark Ones, we cannot risk—we dare not risk—using the shorter path. Lé-Ciabbeth …” He hesitated over the name. “Ciabbeth did not come?”

  Zay shook his head again, and his voice was only a fragment, a splinter of bleached glass. “No.”

  There was long silence. Then the long-haired man said, “I’m sorry. Truly, truly, I am sorry, Zay. But there can be no more delay. Too many lives depend on it, not only the lives of those here now, but their children, and their grandchildren—all the generations of humankind who will shelter within these walls. They will thank you, and bless your name.”

  The old man nodded. “And that,” he murmured, “will make it better, I suppose?”

  Tir’s father said, “If I could do it, Zay, I would.”

  Zay looked up into his face, bitter, weary beyond words—Tir didn’t think he’d ever seen such wormwood wryness in human eyes. “Yes,” said Zay softly. “I believe you would, Dare.” He got to his feet, straightened his dark robes around him, his hands fumbling. “Ciabbeth …”

  “When she comes,” said Dare softly, “she will thank you, too.”

  Tir shivered as the men walked away between the crystal pillars. The cold seemed to grow on him, the cold of memory in that place, and it seemed to him that he heard someone’s voice whispering, She never came. She never came. She never came.

  The whispers seemed to echo from the dark beyond the room where he now sat, the impacted blackness that not even the fire’s tiny light could dissipate. It seemed to him that cold flowed in from that blackness, a cold worse than the bitter chill of the frost-stricken chambers, a living cold, malicious and vile.

  Footfalls that weren’t really footfalls. Bitter hatred, wormwood resentment.

  She never came.

  A badness deep and rotted, a badness that collected in pockets in the turnings of corridors, the neat cells that no one had lived in long enough to make their homes, in the black well at the heart of the crypts that Tir knew plunged down eternally into darkness.

  Fickle, wretched, cowardly whiners … The resentment was a stench imbued deep within the stone. Ingrates. Cowards and ingrates.

  From the corridor came, with the cold, a thread of whistling, a half-identifiable tune.

  He’d heard that tune. He knew it.

  Was it a tune? Sometimes it sounded like an old man’s voice, whispering in the nightmare blackness.

  Names, Tir thought. Sometimes, in those bad places that he hurried Hethya through, he could hear that hoarse, muttering voice telling over names in the dark. He didn’t think Hethya could hear. It terrified him because he knew those names. He could see their faces in his mind and knew what had happened to them. Could see the things they wore—a child’s black shoes sewn with green gems, a woman’s fan—things they’d left behind.

  And above everything else, the anger that soaked every stone, every wisp of lichen, every vine and mushroom as poison soaks a sponge, imbuing its every fragment. Anger and resentment and hate.

  And magic that lived on.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Wait. They will open the Doors again. They have to. She was out there somewhere. She could restore him. Couldn’t she?

  The Icefalcon waited. Aching with the demon wounds and cold to the core of his heart, he trod the spatchcock light and shadow of the haunted Aisle and listened to the men searching the Keep’s darkness around him. Now
and then lights flickered in the skull-eye windows, high up on the Aisle walls, or in the doorways that weren’t blocked thick with vines. Sometimes a man would emerge from one and cross the lumpy, tangled mess of the floor, holding aloft a torch or a lamp. And may our Ancestors help us all if some fool of a clone drops a brand into this dry bramble! Water dripped and trickled down the wall below the water clock, and occasionally the great flat leaden chime would speak, marking time as it had marked it, meaninglessly, for years beyond years.

  Night lay thick in the corners, more dense than any darkness outside. Sometimes demon-lights drifted into sight or slipped like glowing insects among the colorless monstrosity of growths that choked the eastern end of the vast space. Sometimes the Icefalcon heard what he thought was a tune whistled, or a voice whispering, far off or just behind his shoulder.

  He would not, he thought, like to be searching alone in those empty, icy halls.

  White light flared in a window on the second level, a brief burst that died away, then a moment later revived. Magelight?

  After a moment’s hesitation—he found himself fearing to leave the Doors, like a haunt trapped eternally in one corner of one room—the Icefalcon left his post and mounted a winding staircase hung with brittle lianas, counting doors along the corridor at the top until he found the place.

  Bektis stood alone in the empty chamber, summoning light.

  Or trying to summon light.

  The old man had suspended a curtain before the door of the cell, not thinking, apparently, of who could see through the window of the Aisle. He had taken off the Hand of Harilómne, and the Icefalcon saw how horribly the flesh underneath it had blistered from chilblain and the constant rubbing and tearing of the gold mesh straps, the heavy jewels. The Hand, and the Collar that went with it, lay in the corner of the room farthest from the door, resting on an ermine muff. Every few seconds the Court Mage’s eyes would stray in that direction as if, contrary to the evidence of his own senses, he needed continuous reassurance that they were there.

  At the moment the Icefalcon entered the room, Bektis was performing the motion—without his usual theatrical flourishes—associated with the summoning of light. It was a gesture that Ingold Inglorion had reduced to a small opening of the fingers. A sort of sickly blue twilight flickered in the room, spotted here and there with hazy zones of brightness that ranged in size from that of a man’s palm to only a few hanging sparks. They faded almost at once. The floor was written over with the chalked Circles of Power, rubbed out and scrawled again, earth and silver and blood. Bektis repeated the gesture, not flourishing but large—a beginner’s gesture, the Icefalcon guessed, like a child imitating his elder’s spear-cast before his muscles are trained.

  A little marshfire dribbled down the walls.

  Bektis pressed his hand to his mouth, and his whole body shivered, like a tapestry shaken by wind.

  His gaze went back to the Hand and the Collar, and in his eyes the Icefalcon saw the sick expression of a drunkard who has been vomiting for days offered a brimming cup of raw gin. And he understood.

  And like the drunkard, Bektis walked over to the alien jewels, lifted the Collar, and put it around his neck again. When he raised his beard out of the way, the Icefalcon saw where the metal and gems had chafed the crêpey wattles of that pallid throat; his mouth flinched and tightened with agony as he buckled the straps of golden mesh around his fingers and wrist. His whole body trembling with defeat, Bektis made the summoning gesture again, and magelight filled the room, refulgent, warm, more gorgeous than the sun.

  Bektis pressed his hand to his eyes, then to his mouth again, trembling so hard the Icefalcon thought that he would fall and breathing in single, desperate gulps. Steps sounded in the corridor—Vair’s, the Icefalcon thought. Bektis didn’t hear until they had nearly reached the curtained door, then he spun, his face resuming its usual hauteur as the blanket slashed aside and the generalissimo stood framed against the pitchy gloom beyond.

  “Where have you been?”

  “The clamor of the men in the Aisle disturbed my concentration, illustrious Lord.” Bektis stroked his beard and looked as if he had not, moments ago, been on the verge of weeping with despair. “I thought that might have been a reason that I was unable to locate the boy.”

  “You should have spoken to Prinyippos about it,” said Vair. “He’d have silenced them.” He nodded back to the hall behind him, and the scout Crested Egret stepped out of the shadows and into the glow of the cell. “And have you had better results here?”

  “Not yet, Lord. All the Keeps were wrought with chambers of Silence, chambers where Runes were laid to prevent wizards from …”

  “Don’t tell me how the Keeps were made, you old dribbler. Ezrikos’ palace in Khirsrit is built on the crypts of a vanished Keep. I’ve been through them a hundred times. They have to come out for water sometime.”

  “And when they do, I will find them, Lord. But there’s a magic in this Keep, a power beyond my experience …”

  “I’m beginning to think common demon-scares are beyond your experience. This band of Raiders that’s coming up from the south …”

  He laid a hand on Crested Egret’s shoulder, and the slender young man almost preened himself at the attention from his lord. “You say the White Raiders have magics of their own. How can you be sure that when you lay the illusions on Prinyippos here to lead them into the trap, the member of the band whose form he’s taken won’t be there to give him the lie? That would make mice-feet of the business when I can least afford to lose that much flesh.”

  “Do not trouble yourself, Lord.” Bektis raised a soothing hand. “The illusion with which I shall cloak Prinyippos is a strong and singular one, not a battle illusion. Battle illusions are by nature more diffuse. This new-arriving band shall be met by Prinyippos before they have time to join with their kindred …”

  The Empty Lakes People are not our kindred! the Icefalcon wanted to shout at him.

  “And Prinyippos shall wear the form of one of those I killed when they attacked me on the knoll where I camped, west of the mountains. If he will but stay for a few moments, I’ll demonstrate. The chasm into which he shall lead them is close enough to the Keep to lend verisimilitude to his story of its being a secondary entrance, and it will require no great exertion, either on my part or that of your men, to collapse the ice above them and bury them.”

  “And you can dispose of the ice afterward?” Vair stroked the ends of his graying mustache; he had shaved again and dressed his hair, but still looked somewhat worse for the journey. “It will do me little good to slaughter two hundred men if I cannot have their flesh for the dethken iares afterward.”

  Bektis straightened his shoulders indignantly. “My Lord, even without the weaponry of the ancient ones, I am not without resources. My power is more than sufficient to clear the ice from the chasm after it has done its job.”

  “That,” said Vair softly, “is well, sorcerer. Because I need flesh to multiply my men into an army capable of conquering Dare’s Keep. And every delay increases the chances of something going awry, of that coward Gargonal abandoning his part outside the walls of the Keep or of those bitches in the South, Empress and Bishop, getting wind of my plans. The last thing they want me to have is a fortress that cannot be breached and a steady supply of food. I need not explain to you, I think, what will happen to you if they overcome us?”

  The Court Mage looked away and cradled the bloodied crystals of the Hand to his breast. “No, my Lord.”

  “Then find the boy and find him soon. The spells you spoke of will break the information out of him quickly enough.”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  “How soon until these new Raiders come close enough that Prinyippos can reach them?”

  “From observing them in my scrying glass, my Lord, I should say that the chimes here will sound five times. On the fifth chiming, we should send out Prinyippos. It will be about the ninth hour of the day then and thus close to twilight
when he leads them into the ice chasm.”

  “Good. Prinyippos, have a company ready to go out at that time.” At least that was what the Icefalcon thought Vair said—he understood the words for company and go out and did not hear any numbers in the locative of time.

  He didn’t need to know that Prinyippos’ words were “Yes, Lord.” The young scout all but rubbed Vair’s legs and purred.

  Flesh to make more warriors. Warriors to invade the Keep.

  But he had the apparatus of the vat—the dethken iares—by the time he conquered Prandhays Keep. For what reason had he come north to this place? And even with hundreds of extra men, he must know the Keep’s walls were impenetrable?

  Tir knew something. Something that would enable Vair to break the Keep.

  Bektis would find the boy, that he did not doubt. Whatever the Hand of Harilómne was doing to Bektis’ powers, when he wore the thing it multiplied his own abilities a dozenfold, at least in certain situations. Neither Hethya nor Loses His Way would be able to protect the child, and the Icefalcon had begun to understand that without the ability to return to his own body, his hours were numbered and leaking away fast.

  Vair was going to trap and kill the Empty Lakes People.

  Ironic, thought the Icefalcon, treading the stone corridors of the Keep of Night—easier to follow than those of Dare’s Keep, at least in his bodiless form. The only reason the trap would work was because the warrior whose face Bektis knew and was at this moment reproducing for Vair’s edification was, by chance, a member of that same people. The Talking Stars People or the Earthsnake People would kill the imitation warrior out of hand.

  He passed through curtains of hissing, colorless squash tendril, traversed fused clumps of creeper and rock-tripe, cells packed thick with toadstools or white plate-fungus, as if in a dream, knowing no human body could go that way. It worried him that this was growing easier, as if the bonds to his own flesh were dissolving. Demons crept through the moss like ants and tormented him with their bites and their poisons; it was harder and harder to tell himself that the pain was illusory.