Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “Surely you knew it had to be something of the kind,” he added, seeing the Icefalcon’s expression of startled enlightenment. Gil had told a number of tales that involved transporters. “Vair na-Chandros is many things, but he isn’t a fool. Of course the only reason he would take such a troublesome journey would be if he thought there was a way from here straight into Dare’s Keep. Even with the Hand of Harilómne, Bektis couldn’t have overpowered Ilae, Rudy, and Wend together, and the wards on the Arrow River Road were strong enough to have warned us of the army’s approach in spite of all Bektis might do.”

  Ingold extended his hands gratefully to the fire. “I guessed as soon as Wend told me Tir had been kidnapped that it had to be something of the sort, and Cold Death’s information only confirmed my suspicions. Vair sought such a thing at Prandhays first, didn’t he, Hethya?”

  “I don’t know what he was seeking after at Prandhays.” Hethya, still sitting in the circle of Loses His Way’s arm, raised her chin from her fists. She had been staring dully at and past the cell’s obsidian wall, as if defeated or expecting punishment; there was a questioning look as she met the wizard’s bright-blue gaze.

  Whatever she saw in Ingold’s eyes must have encouraged her, for she sat up a little straighter and said, “That Bektis, he went through every stick and stitch of Mother’s scrolls—dragged ’em all down and spent all the winter at ’em, the ones she’d never known the tongues of—while Vair and Bektis hauled me out of me cell every couple of days and asked me this and that, and me never knowin’ what it was they wanted to hear or what they’d do to me if they didn’t get it.”

  Her nostrils flared, and she fell silent again, the twist in her lips a line of ugly memories.

  “Now you speak of it, they did ask me about travel between Keeps—they asked Oale Niu, that is—and I kept sayin’ there wasn’t much, there wasn’t much. Stands to reason, you see.”

  She shrugged and took another bite from the dried fruit that Ingold had passed all around. “You’d never want to get farther than you could find shelter at sunset. I would have said, ‘None at all,’ but Mother did find some pretty old scrolls of what she said looked like copies of copies of things from far, far back, talkin’ of travel, so there must have been some. You’d never have got me out.”

  Her eyebrows, coppery in the glinting amber light, pulled together. “Two accounts, they was, and both of ’em full of fightin’ off the Dark with torches and wizards puttin’ up flares all round the camps, and such, though we had no way of knowin’ how far after the coming of the Dark those were written, nor who’d been at ’em and changed ’em around since. People do, you know,” she added. “Mum found two or three times, where she’d have a tale written one way, and then another one fifty or so years later, where somebody’d changed it.”

  “That,” the Icefalcon said haughtily, “is because civilized people make up so many stories to amuse themselves that they do not understand truth when they encounter it. Among my people it would not have happened.”

  “Among your people all you talk of is animal tracks and the weather, I’ve heard.”

  “Of a certainty.” Loses His Way looked wounded by the distaste in her voice. “How else can you know where to hunt, or what the pasturage for your horses will be, or where the game will graze did you not know where the rains have been in the spring? How can you tell which herds travel where unless you know the tracks of their leaders and where they went last spring and the spring before? And besides,” he added, “they are friends, those leaders. The herd of Broken Horn, the great rhinoceros of the Ten Muddy Streams Country, I have followed his tracks for fifteen years now. I know where he is likely to lead his people in seasons when the rain comes before the Moon of Blossoms and when it doesn’t fall in the Twisted Hills Country until after the New Moon of Fawns.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Ingold, turning encouragingly to Hethya. He had experience with the peoples of the Real World once they got on the subject of weather and animal tracks.

  “Be that as it may,” she said. “I cribbed pretty heavy off those travel stories, and Vair, he never could get around me.”

  “And I take it,” said Ingold, his deep, scratchy voice a little dreamy, “that one of those two travel tales concerned this place.”

  “Aye,” Hethya said softly. “Aye, it did that.”

  Far off a man’s voice could be heard shouting nonsense words, or perhaps crying out in another tongue. Ingold lifted his head, blue eyes wary under eyelids marked with tiny, hooked, vicious scars; listening. Sorting sound from sound, as mages did, sorting the darkness with his mind. The Icefalcon thought of those endless hallways stretching away into shadow, the chambers glimpsed in confusing dreams, rustling with lubberly vegetation that crept with demons, into which men bored stubbornly, stupidly, working their way inward, not out.

  I will eat them all.

  His memory had curious gaps in it, but some images were branded into his consciousness: an old man gripping a struggling demon between his hands, grinning as he tore chunks of its glowing, plasmic pseudoflesh with his misshapen teeth and drank of its life.

  The Keep was coming to life.

  There was something he was forgetting. Something he’d heard. Bektis cradling blood and jewels to his breast. Prinyippos preening himself. Vair …

  You think you can escape?

  “I couldn’t say I’d been one of them as had left this place, see,” Hethya went on after a moment, “because I didn’t know how long after the coming of the Dark that was. And I didn’t know what Bektis knew. But Bektis already knew that this place had been left, for whatever reason: left standin’ empty, he said, and the people all just walked out and shut the doors behind ’em. God knows why.”

  “I can guess,” said Ingold. “We came very close to it ourselves a few years ago—leaving Renweth, I mean. An ice storm killed all the stock and most of the food plants. This far north, with the Ice advancing, it was bound to happen. Or maybe there was sickness.”

  The Icefalcon sat up a little, his back propped against the wall, his sword near his hand—he was never completely comfortable unless his sword was near his hand and he had a dagger where he could get to it fast—and accepted another potato cake. In the back of his mind a name tugged at him, a half-forgotten vision of a warrior and a child. “Who was the old man?”

  “Zay.” Tir looked up, a little surprised that none of them knew, none of them remembered. “His name is Zay.”

  Once Hethya spoke of it, Tir recalled very clearly the caravans from the Keep of the Shadow straggling into Renweth Vale over Sarda Pass.

  He didn’t remember whose memory it was. The glaciers were low on the mountains, though not as low as they were nowadays. The mountains themselves looked different, waterfalls down bare rockfaces where trees grew now. The air was very cold. He remembered how his breath—that other boy’s breath—smoked and his fingertips hurt within his gray fur gloves. He remembered how few they were, only handfuls of women and a couple of children. The men had all perished, victims of the Dark.

  He did know that whoever it was who had originally seen this emigration had known that these were the people from the Keep of Tiyomis who didn’t know about Zay. He—whoever he was—could not remember all those other little boys, all those other young men, whose glimpsed recollections lurked in Tir’s mind. He, whoever he was, had been untroubled by the nightmares of acid-blood stink on the wind, the dreams of driving an ax home into another man’s helmeted skull on the field of shouting battle, the sudden terrors of attempted murders long past: a happy and thoughtless young man.

  He hadn’t known about Brycothis, either.

  Tir said, “Zay was like Brycothis. He was one of the wizards who raised the Keeps.”

  He spoke from the shelter of Ingold’s arm, tucked beneath the old man’s mantle like a chick under its mother’s wing. Clinging to the old man, delirious with relief at the familiar smells of wood smoke and soap, of chemicals and herbs; the smells of the K
eep. After the first hysterical hugging, he’d stepped back, knowing a wizard needed space to work in. But he’d clung to the old man’s robe when Ingold went out into the corridor again, down to another cell to work the spells to summon the Icefalcon back to his body, spells that couldn’t be worked in the Silent room. He’d had to bite his lip and then his hand to keep from speaking.

  At last, when Ingold rose from the Icefalcon’s side, wiping his face, Tir had whispered, “Is Rudy okay?”

  “Rudy is well.” Ingold had ruffled Tir’s black hair as he said it; there was no lie in the blue eyes. “I worked a healing magic on him as soon as I entered the Keep, before coming here. He’s weak—he was badly hurt—but he will recover. The first thing he did when he woke was ask after you. Your mother is taking care of him and praying every night for your safety.”

  So his mother was all right, too.

  He wanted to kick Vair for lying.

  No, he thought. He wanted to … There were other things, adult things, evil things, that he wanted to do to Vair. Things that frightened him, turned him sick even to consider.

  He pressed his face to Ingold’s side and tried to push the thoughts away, to look aside from those dark places where others before him had looked.

  Ingold was here. Everything was going to be all right.

  “Brycothis told the other mages about—about entering into the Keeps,” he said after a time. “About becoming part of the heart of the Keep. Giving up their bodies, and their lives, so their magic would link the Keeps with the magic of the earth and the stars forever. Some other wizard was going to do it … Fyanin? Fy-something. But he died on the way, when the Dark attacked them at that hill where we were.

  “There were a lot of Keeps,” he went on, looking from face to face of these people who surrounded him, these people he loved—even Loses His Way, who had scared him at first. “But there weren’t a lot of mages. The bad king killed them. And some of them were bad themselves. And a lot of them they couldn’t spare because they needed them to fight the Dark. But Zay rode north with … I think with Dare of Renweth … and Fyanach because Zay was from the North, from the Valley of Shilgae, which was real rich then. They were his people. He was their guardian.”

  “And they left him,” murmured Ingold. “They left him alone.”

  The Icefalcon frowned. “He must have known why.”

  “Must he?” Ingold widened his eyes at the young man. “Why do you say that? When someone hurts you—hurts you very badly—do you ever really derive any consolation from the knowledge that they were only acting as they felt driven to act?”

  The Icefalcon saw again Blue Child’s eyes meeting his across the longhouse fire. Sometimes the Wise were too damned perceptive.

  “And he has been here,” he said. “All this time.”

  His mind returned to the eclipsed shadow, the wobbling fingernails, the vile glimmer of unseen eyes. He thought about the evil slow-growing plants that choked the corridors and chambers, about the spots of deadly cold. It was as if, he thought, they were locked in the body of a beast long dead, wandering in a vast, stilled, ebon heart.

  “Was this Far-Walker, this transporter, ever used?”

  Ingold shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “If it was, it fell out of general use long ago. Certainly no record of it survived, not even in the archives of the City of Wizards.”

  He wrapped up the rest of the potato cakes and stowed them in his knapsack, which he shoved into a corner. He had always, thought the Icefalcon, looked more like a beggar than a wizard, except for the sword he belted at his hip. And indeed, within this chamber where the Runes of Silence were written he was not a wizard, only a very tough old man.

  He settled now by the fire and extended his palms to the warmth. “I’ve never seen mention of it in any of the record crystals, either, and most of those were made well before the coming of the Dark Ones. Perhaps it was originated by the mages of that time but in the end considered too dangerous. The Keeps depended for their safety on absolute impregnability. One set of Doors, and those locked and guarded with the most stringent of magical wards. And nothing else, as I knew to my sorrow, from those nights sleeping cold on the mountainside and stealing food from Vair’s troops to stay alive. Fairly good food, too, if you knew which mess to visit—though one produced meals that tasted excellent but made me truly ill afterward.”

  “Ah, that’ll be me cousin Athkum.” Hethya nodded. “They took him on as a cook—as a slave, of course. Cousin Athkum was another of me mother’s pupils, though not to magic born. He was a dab hand at herbology and healing brews, though. I’d be surprised,” she added casually, “if any of them live much past the end of summer.”

  “Good heavens,” Ingold murmured, alarmed.

  “You probably didn’t take enough to hurt you.” Hethya shrugged. “By the time enough accumulates in their systems—he says brown-cap mushrooms are the best—he’ll be far away. It isn’t as if they didn’t ask for it.”

  “I suppose not.” Ingold shuddered a little. “I shall take steps to invoke spells of healing on myself the moment I’m out of this room. As for the transporter, it may only have been an experiment and never used at all. In any case, all knowledge of it was lost at the Renweth end. This may have been deliberate, for the archways of crystal that seem to have demarcated its resonating chambers were bricked up and plastered over. Brycothis directed Ilae to it, of course, but she could make no sense of the images she placed in her mind. It was only when you, Icefalcon, came through the wall as I sat meditating there that I realized how the function and shape of the room had to have been changed.”

  “Can we go back?”

  “We can,” Ingold said slowly. “It would be best if we can do it without showing Vair where the transporter lies. I’m fairly good at covering my tracks, but magic won’t work in the chamber itself nor in several of the corridors round about it, and I’m not sure that four adults could pass those corridors again without leaving traces that could be deciphered in the frost and the vines. That’s what he wanted you for, wasn’t it, Tir?”

  The boy nodded. “I had to get away,” he said. “I couldn’t let him—I never will let him. He’s evil. He’s going to make more soldiers and take them to the Keep …”

  “Out of what, pray?” demanded Hethya scornfully. “Mushrooms?”

  “The Empty Lakes People,” said the Icefalcon.

  The others looked at him, silent with shock.

  “They’re on their way here, two hundred of them,” he said. “I’m sorry. I …” He shook his head, angry at himself for not speaking of it before. Like a single black comb on the table of crystal needles, like a dream about Bektis summoning light, the conversation had slipped away in clouds of demon-laughter and pain.

  “Breaks Noses leads them. After four more chimes of the clock Bektis will lay a glamour upon Crested Egret—Prinyippos—so that he can lead them into a crevasse in the ice, where they will be killed by an avalanche. Vair will use their flesh as he used the flesh of the sheep, he says, to manufacture ten or twelve or twenty warriors, where before he could only call forth four from his iron vat.

  “And with that many warriors to assist in the search,” he added reasonably, “stupid as they are, it can only be a matter of time before they locate the transporter without the help of our lad Scarface here.”

  Hethya said, “T’cha!” in offense, and slapped at his foot, which was the nearest part of his body to her. But the Icefalcon saw Tir’s fleet shy grin and the duck of his head, as the deformity and shame transformed to something men envied, the mark of battle survived.

  “And where,” Ingold asked gently, “does Vair keep this vat of his?”

  Three corridors away from the dark triple cell beside the Aisle, Ingold paused and closed his eyes, dreaming or meditating or doing whatever it was that Wise Ones did. When they turned the final corridor, it was to discover the door guards of the cell gone. By the muddy boot prints there had been two of them this time,
Vair evidently having learned a lesson about single guards in that corridor. The Icefalcon felt a twinge of irritated envy toward people who didn’t have to step through a slashing fire-fall of pain in order to send the clones on some sort of wild-goose chase to the farthest latrine in the Keep, but he put it aside as illogical.

  Ingold paid for his powers in other ways.

  Neither the Icefalcon nor Loses His Way breathed a sound as they traversed the short stretch of corridor and Ingold slipped back the door bolt. The wizard paused on the threshold, like a cat balking at the entry to a haunted room. Then he stepped in, moving with a wariness that made the Icefalcon uneasy. Anything that scared Ingold Inglorion was indeed to be avoided at all costs.

  Whatever it was, he noticed that Loses His Way didn’t seem to sense anything amiss. Saving, of course, the smell of old blood about the dethken iares, which was almost drowned in the overwhelming stink of the clones’ corpses. Creepers had already grown through the doorway, probing into the brown mess. The chieftain muttered, “Pfaugh! This is ugly hunting. He will make warriors of those?”

  “Of their flesh, yes.” Ingold was clearly fascinated. “I’ve read very old accounts of this procedure, though its use was lost with the technology of this apparatus. These”—he lifted the crystal needles from their table, turning them to the dim feather of magelight that floated above his head, angled the glass beads on their heads to catch some gleam within them—“went into the nerve points of the body, the crystal into the head and shoulders, the iron into the limbs, the gold into the abdomen and organs.”

  He moved from object to object, running his heavy-muscled hands along the twisted glass and iron of the arches surmounting the tub and the visceral-looking glass tubes. “The power was aligned through the canopy, though they’ve got it sourced wrong. Those two crystals at the foot belong on either side of this sphere here, in an equilateral triangle. Once that was done the power was self-aligning, and a circle chalked round the whole would close the circuit and start the process working. I wonder where Bektis learned of it?”