Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  He could end the pain. Sometimes he thought about it so desperately that all that kept him from dissolving was the knowledge that if he did so here in the darkness, he might not even be united with the warmth of the sun.

  Only the chill of the ice-ridden night beneath the glaciers, forever.

  The pain was real.

  Dove in the Sun stepped forth from the wall, the Dove with her chest opened and organs glistening through the smashed ribs, the Dove with blood on the wild roses twined in her sun-bright hair. “Why didn’t you come back for me, o my kinsman? Why didn’t you even look?”

  That pain was real, too. It was hard to force himself to remember that he didn’t have to stop and explain to her. As a child of the Talking Stars, she would have known, lying alone on the ledge beneath her dying horse, that her wounds were hopeless. He passed her by, and her voice followed him down the corridor.

  “Why didn’t you even come to hold my hand as I died?”

  He had no reply to that.

  Then he came to a shattered black hell of frost curtains, hanging spears of ice lengthened to bars across corridors and throughout cells, hollow columns of water frozen harder than iron.

  Words whispered there.

  And an old man waited among cold-killed vines the thickness of a horse’s neck, among translucent sheets of dribbled ice and obscene dead mushrooms.

  An old man with his tattooed hands folded, as if source-less light fell on them and left the rest of him lapped in darkness. The Icefalcon could see with the eyes of a ghost, and those eyes were blinded to the old man’s face. For some reason he knew he was ruinously old, white hair grown out shabbily around the base of the skull to a spiderweb cloak over the bent shoulders. Nails uncut for years beyond speaking twisted back on themselves, vile as the curves of the perished vines.

  His teeth were not human teeth. His eyes no longer human eyes.

  “You came back.” The voice was the glowing slime that drips from rotted meat. “You came back after all.”

  The Icefalcon felt the hair lift on his scalp. “I have never been in this place before, old man.” Everything in him, ghost though that everything was, screamed at him: Flee. Flee. Get out of here at once.

  “And they didn’t tell you of me?” When the old man moved, his robes made a noise like thin paper, eroded by eons of time.

  “They told me nothing, old man. Forgive me if I speak disrespect.”

  “Forgive you?” The old man put his head to one side, and there was something horribly wrong about the glisten of the unseen eyeball. “Forgive? I was told … I was told my name would be remembered. That I would be thanked. That I would be thanked forever.”

  He moved toward the Icefalcon, extending one thin arm, the crooked nails bobbing and trembling like twigs.

  “I was not thanked,” he whispered. “And she never came, though the way was open. The way was always open. She never came, and they all departed, all left me, after what I had done for them. And now …” He smiled. “Now that you’re all back, I’m going to make sure that no one ever leaves again.”

  He giggled, reaching out, and into the Icefalcon’s mind flashed the image of himself, his phantom consciousness, being absorbed into these black walls. Not to die, but to remain, forever, listening to the old man telling over names to himself in the frozen darkness.

  Logic dictated immediate and precipitate flight, and the Icefalcon fled. Behind him he could hear the old man creaking with shrill laughter. “You think you can escape?” Glancing over his shoulder he saw the fragile form lift like a blown sheet, whirl through the air toward him, white hair swirling, skeletal arms outstretched. “You think you can escape me?”

  They blew through corridors blocked with foul vegetation, past fountains knotted with ice. In one huge cell that was little more than a seething hairball of lichen and vine, three clones were struggling, fighting their way inward, not outward, at the whispered lurings of demons. The men were weeping with fright and pain, trying to escape the leathery tendrils around them. The old man turned aside at the sight of them, laughing when the demons tried to flee.

  “Not so fast, my little tender ones.” He fell on them like a fast-moving hawk. The demons tried to slip through the walls, and the black stone refused to let them pass. The last the Icefalcon saw of the old man, he was holding the littlest of the demons between his two hands, eating its head while the clones wept and groaned among the bonds that clinched tighter and ever tighter around them, strangling out their lives.

  In the hidden chamber on the second level, the Icefalcon’s body lay wrapped in spare coats and clothing, his weapons in a pile at his side. At least they had that much sense, thought the Icefalcon, trembling with cold and exhaustion. The sight of a Wathe-forged sword, its hilt stamped with the emblems of the Guards of Gae, would have given Vair more information than he should have.

  Tir sat still, racked with a slight, constant shiver. Hethya was arguing with Loses His Way. “And I suppose all those double and triple and umpty-upple warriors of Vair’s are just going to turn their wee faces to the wall and fall asleep?”

  “Pah! Insects. The boy must be fed. Us, too. Else we will be unable to flee, unable to help ourselves or anyone else.” Loses His Way’s face was frightful, a swollen mass of purpling flesh that gaped in six or eight places where the whip had opened the skin. Blood caked his beard and his braids, and the few teeth he had left in his mouth were ragged chips.

  “Should we leave this room we’ll be walking into places where Bektis can see us, does he care to look into that crystal of his. That he’s been busy about this and that is all that’s saved us, but every time’s another risk.”

  “So ask this Ancestor that dwells in your head, this Ancestor that guided you into alliance with the Father of All Traitors, to tell you where safe places can be found! She knew this place.”

  Hethya straightened her back, her face altering to the cold, haughty countenance of Oale Niu, and she opened her mouth to reply. Then she thought again, and her shoulders slumped; her red lips closed. “Would I could,” she said softly. “There is no Ancestor. Your lanky pal figured it. He’ll tell you the whole of it when he finally comes back, if he comes back.”

  She sighed, all fight gone, and turned her face. She still wore the clone’s overcoat and wrappings and would easily have passed for one of Vair’s warriors in the dark. Her mouth tightened hard, not to give anything of herself away, but Loses His Way saw, and the anger went out of his face.

  “There,” he said gently, and stepped to her, putting a comforting arm like a bear’s great forepaw around her shoulders. “There, Little Ancestor, there’s no need to weep.”

  She shook her head violently. “It’s tired I am, that’s all,” she said, tears creeping down her cheeks.

  “I know.”

  “I just … I did try.”

  The broken, toothless mouth moved into what had once been a smile. “I know. And you did well. As well as any warrior.”

  “I’m sorry, sweeting.” She looked down at Tir, defeated. “You’ve met His Nastiness. It was join with him or … well, have happen to me what I’d rather not have happen.”

  “It’s all right.” Tir’s voice was tiny in the gloom. “I knew you made it up.” He stepped close to her on her other side, put his arm around her waist as he did with his mother, and leaned his head against her hip. “Way back at Bison Knoll I knew.”

  Hethya laughed a little, wept a little, returned the pressure of his embrace, and with her other hand patted the big, knotted hand of Loses His Way.

  “I did what I could.”

  Loses His Way smiled, and even through the blood there was a warmth to it, like the sun’s ki in whom the Icefalcon’s people did not believe. “We all do what we can, Little Ancestor. You kept the boy alive. No small thing in dealing with that carrion eater from the South. You did well.”

  Tir went on, “And I don’t know if … if Bektis will be able to see us, even if we leave this room, or if they’ll
be able to find us even if he does see us. The old man might not let him.”

  “What old man, sweeting?”

  The Icefalcon had come close and had tried already, vainly, to enter the body lying cold and still in its nest of furs. Pain throbbed and cramped him, worse and growing worse still, agonizing, nauseating, flesh shredded, teeth marks showing on the exposed bones.

  Was this why he couldn’t return to his own flesh?

  Had he destroyed his ability to do so when he’d taken on the form—for seconds only—of Prinyippos in order to command the clone?

  Or had he simply been away from his body too long?

  You think you can escape? the old man had screamed after him with peals of mocking laughter.

  And the voice of the clone shouting dumb echoes of voices in his head: I will eat you all.

  Despair closed over him, the knowledge that he would die here in the darkness. The knowledge that it was over.

  “The old man in the Keep,” whispered Tir, and his words brought the Icefalcon back to awareness of his surroundings, of these three people beside him, with whom his life was entwined. “The old man with the tattoos all over his hands and the big long fingernails …” His little pink fingers described the obscene curves of the overgrown claws, and the Icefalcon thought, He’s seen him, too.

  “He lives in the Keep.”

  “You mean a ghost?” asked Loses His Way doubtfully. Besides being a White Raider, his swollen, bloodied face was something from a nightmare, but Tir seemed to have taken his horrible appearance in stride. Loses His Way and Tir drew Hethya back to the little fire, and the chieftain selected a couple more fragments of wood to feed the blaze.

  The boy shook his head. “He’s alive,” he said. “That’s what the whole thing was about. He’s been alive …” He broke off, groping for words, struggling to make them understand, to understand himself.

  Loses His Way and Hethya traded a look of incomprehension, then looked back at the child. “You mean he was living here before we burrowed through the ice?” Hethya asked gently. “How did he get here, sweeting? What did he eat? Not those filthy plants, to be sure.”

  “I can’t.” Tir buried his face in his arms. “I can’t say.”

  She stroked his black hair. “There, there, it’s all right,” she murmured. “You don’t have to say.”

  She looked up at Loses His Way again. “Your lanky pal’s a sort of ghost, though he says he’s alive, too. He comes to us in dreams.”

  “Shadow-walking,” agreed Loses His Way, nodding.

  “Here,” Hethya said, and looked around her suddenly. “What am I thinking?” She pulled a rag from her pocket; wet it from her water bottle. “Let me at least clean you up and make a civilized man of you.”

  The chieftain grinned a little as she daubed water on the rag and very gently began to wash the cuts on his face, and he said, “Ah, never will you make a civilized man of me, Little Ancestor.”

  “Civilized man—now there’s a contradiction in terms.”

  And both laughed a little, the sparkle of their eyes meeting on the outer edge of pain and death and dark.

  “Now, I may not be some reborn mage of the Times Before,” she said when she had finished, “but me mother taught me a bit of meditation. It always pays, she said, to know how to calm your mind. Lord knows I’m not going to sleep in any hurry, but meditation may serve for him to speak to us at least.”

  Loses His Way nodded, “Our shamans do the same if a shadow-walker becomes lost. It is not something my people do often, you understand—shadow-walk, that is—for it is very dangerous.” He nodded down at the Icefalcon’s body. “As we see.”

  “He’ll be all right,” whispered Tir anxiously, “won’t he?”

  Hethya’s glance crossed the warchief’s; it was Loses His Way who replied. “That we do not know, Little King. It may be that he will not. But if anyone can return after this long, it is the Icefalcon.”

  He grinned with his broken teeth and puffed lips, blackened blue eyes dancing in the flittering light. “He would not have it said of him that he permitted even death to get the better of him, so of course he must return.”

  Tir giggled. And what is wrong, demanded the Icefalcon, with striving to be perfect in survival? For there are times when only the perfect survive.

  But he was glad that Tir had lost some of his look of fear.

  “It would help if we had smoke,” said Loses His Way, “or some of those herbs that the Wise Ones burn to dissociate the mind from the flesh.”

  “You’re telling me, laddy-o.” Hethya sighed, and closed her eyes. “You’re telling me.”

  “The Wise Ones taught me this …” Loses His Way gravely touched her face and temples, her hands and arms, at the points of relaxation, the nexus of the body’s energies. The tension in Hethya’s shoulders eased, and some of the grimness left her face.

  “What is it?” whispered Loses His Way, seeing Tir flinch.

  “That’s where they put the needles in,” the boy replied in a strained undervoice. “When they make the tethyn.”

  “They are the map of the body, the sources of its energies. Anything can be used for evil as well as good, Little King.”

  In the corridors far off the chime spoke, and once the Icefalcon heard the rustle of hide-shod feet, two or three turnings away, and a mutter of scared voices. But they faded—evidently the ventilation in this chamber was good enough that the smell of the smoke did not carry—and the dense silence returned, thicker, it seemed, than before. Hethya never dropped into sleep. The Icefalcon sensed her mind always working, dragged away to one course or another despite the discipline—which, he guessed, she had never practiced as the Wise Ones practiced it.

  In the corridor the vines rustled, a sighing of movement, though there was no wind.

  You think you can escape?

  “What was that?” Hethya’s eyes popped open.

  Tir whispered, “The old man.”

  Loses His Way made a move toward the fire. “Don’t be an ass,” breathed Hethya, her hand on his wrist. “He’ll see in the dark.”

  The warchief was on his feet already, drew his sword, stepped to the doorway, a bearlike bulk in the gloom.

  “Out the back,” said Hethya. “We can …”

  “We can’t leave the Icefalcon.” Tir was on his feet, too, trembling like a leaf in a winter storm.

  “For pity’s sake, laddie …”

  “He’s a Guard,” said Tir. “I’m his lord. I can’t.”

  Hethya made a move back toward him. “Too late,” murmured Loses His Way, firelight tracing the blade’s edge as it lifted to strike. “Can you see him? White hair, like a ghost in midnight.”

  Silence flowed out of the dark of the corridor, a long thinking silence, palpable as the ever-thickening cold. Far off a demon bobbed, backlighting the spiderweb of white hair, the dark shape cloaked in magic. Somewhere a voice whispered, thin and envenomed with rotting hate.

  There was another rustle, sharp as the hiss of a snake.

  Then two soft swift steps, a dark bulk emerging from darkness … A muffled curse, and Ingold Inglorion threw himself through the door, white hair disheveled and drawn sword flickering with pale light. He rolled under Loses His Way’s strike and turned, panting, to stand for a moment in the doorway, facing out into the haunted abyss.

  For a moment it seemed that the shadows reached out to him, surrounded him, smothering and evil …

  Then it seemed that something altered, shifted, and there was only darkness again.

  “Dratted plants.” Ingold turned; his voice was like flawed bronze, brown velvet, and rust, unmistakable. “To think I once liked salad. Miss Hethya—or should I say Lady Oale Niu—I do hope you have something with which to make tea.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “It was you that I saw.” The Icefalcon pulled the thick mammoth-wool coat closer and experimentally flexed his hands. Though this part of the Keep wasn’t noticeably cold, he could not stop shi
vering. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again. “In the chamber with the crystal pillars—last night? The night before?”

  In the dark of this place it was difficult enough to keep track of time, even without the nightmare of suffocation, cold, demons, and terror. An echo of pain remained, a phantom imprint burned in his mind. Every few minutes he would feel his own arms again, not trusting himself to believe that there was flesh over the bone.

  “That was me.” Ingold dug into one of the packets of food he’d brought in his knapsack, which he and Loses His Way had retrieved from the corridor while the Icefalcon, numb, dizzy, and feeling like a piece of very old driftwood on a beach, lay staring at the ocher firelight patterns on the ceiling, blinking now and then and rejoicing obscurely in the friction of a real eyelid over a real eye. “Have a cake.”

  The old man extended a potato cake to him. The Icefalcon devoured it ravenously and immediately felt queasy at the revival of digestive organs. He wasn’t about to say so, however. He was the Icefalcon—and food was food.

  “You might have informed me,” said the Icefalcon, “that you’d followed us after all. Your presence would have been useful in any number of instances.”

  “I’m very sure it would have been,” Ingold replied soothingly.

  “I take it your interesting little accounts of the Siege of Renweth were fabricated from reports sent to you by Ilae and Wend?”

  “By no means.” The wizard took a bite of dried apricot—apricots grew well in the Keep’s crypts, along with grapes, cherries, and several varieties of nuts. Other than the usual cuts and scratches gained from cross-country travel and sleeping rough, and a bandage around one hand that the Icefalcon remembered from his vision in the pillared chamber, Ingold did not seem much the worse for wear: shabby and unprepossessing as an old boot and several times tougher.

  “Four days ago—which was the last time your sister spoke to me—I was in the Vale of Renweth, readying the latest of my half-dozen attempts to draw off General Gargonal’s troops long enough to let me slip through the Doors. That one succeeded, I’m pleased to say—it’s quite surprising what men will believe if you take them off guard in the middle of the afternoon. When you saw me, I was in one of the laundry rooms in the Royal Sector, specifically, the chamber Brycothis designated, or seemed to designate, as the Renweth end of what Gil refers to as a transporter.