Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “Wherever he found that gem he wears on his hand, belike,” said the Icefalcon. “He calls it the Hand of Harilómne. It grants him greater power than ever I saw him use.”

  Ingold, leaning over the vat to touch the brownish film that seemed to emerge from the quicksilver lining itself, looked up swiftly, and his white brows pulled together. “Yes,” he said, and there was old knowledge, old anger in his voice. “Yes, I know what the Hand does. And it probably isn’t what Bektis thinks.”

  The Icefalcon leaned his back against the doorpost. He found that even the walk down to the chamber had winded him. His calves ached and felt on the verge of cramping; annoying, he thought, and something he should be beyond. “I thought you said the Devices of the Times Before were beyond your ken.”

  “Many of them are. But Harilómne was hardly a mage of the Times Before, and he left accounts of his Hand—and of this Device, as it happens, which he tried hard to duplicate before he was driven out of the West of the World by the Council of Wizards. I should imagine your girl Hethya’s mother encountered an incomplete copy of his work on what he called the Cauldron of Warriors, hidden away at Prandhays Keep.”

  “She is not my girl,” said the Icefalcon indignantly, but Ingold had already turned back to the vat and was studying the pattern of tiny lights that gleamed starlike in its lining. The Icefalcon followed him and saw that the bottom was an inch or so deep in the brownish ooze that filmed the sides. He shrank from the thought of touching it, even should the salvation of his soul depend upon so doing.

  There was evil here against which rivalries for love or power, revenge, or the falsification of a sacrificial omen were the spites of a pettish child. A true evil, a monstrous and vile greed that disregarded all but itself.

  “What does the old one do?” Loses His Way nodded toward Ingold, his voice low so that the mage would not hear. “What does he need to know, other than that this thing must be destroyed before Vair can make use of it again?”

  Ingold moved on, fingering tubes and cylinders, and glanced calculatingly back at the chamber’s door. Knowing him, the Icefalcon realized that the old man was wondering if there were a way of stealing all or part of the apparatus, a way of carrying it intact back to the Keep of Dare, to be studied and preserved.

  He came swiftly around the end of the vat and closed his hand on the heavy wrist. “Destroy it,” he said.

  Later he realized that the fault lay in them both. Ingold for not simply destroying the thing at once—provided that such a thing were possible—and himself for distracting the mage and for a fatal second tying up Ingold’s sword-hand and his own.

  “Fool, Inglorion!” thundered a voice from the direction of the door. “Ten times a …”

  Had Ingold not needed to shake free of the Icefalcon’s grip he might have leveled his staff, fired off a spell of lightning and ruin, a moment faster. As it was, Bektis had time to duck, slipping back out of the doorway and slamming it shut. The blast of power Ingold hurled crashed the door open again, demolishing the heavy wood in the process; the Icefalcon stepped back from the wizard at the same moment Loses His Way stepped forward; Bektis’ return blast of lightning caught them both.

  Loses His Way went flying over the pile of corpses and against the wall, gasping with shock. Ingold staggered, catching himself on his staff for balance, and Bektis, in the doorway once more, cried out words in a voice of power, words the Icefalcon had heard before. The Court Mage lifted his hand, and the Icefalcon could see it encased in the gold-woven crystal Weapon of Harilómne, chilly light lancing, flashing through the matrices of power and showing up the bones within the flesh.

  Ingold flinched, ducked, holding up his hand. Fire shattered around him, ripped long scars in the black stone of the floor. He hurled something—cloud, darkness, a smell of dust and blood—and dimly through blindness the Icefalcon saw Bektis’ free hand move, trailing light from its fingertips like an acrobat making patterns with ribbon.

  The patterns traced and scattered, spreading out across the black walls of the room itself, engulfing Ingold like a reaching hand. Ingold rolled to his feet and tried to rush the older mage, sword held high, and the Icefalcon realized an instant before it happened what Bektis was doing and cried out, “NO!”

  Bektis turned in a swirling extravaganza of cloak and beard and slapped his right hand, the Hand of Harilómne, outspread into the center of the rushing pattern of color drawn from the walls. Ingold had almost reached him when thin blue lightning fingered out from the ceiling, the walls, from every corner of the chamber, stitching into the old mage’s body like needles. Ingold stumbled, fell, got to his feet, and came on again, but shreds and shards of something that wasn’t light and wasn’t darkness seemed to peel from the very fabric of the Keep, ringing him in a nimbus of burning. He fell again, and Bektis removed Hand and Weapon from the wall and stretched forth his other hand, signing the flaring, chittering darkness to depart.

  It did not.

  Lightning flashed and wickered from the ceiling again, driving Ingold back along the floor. The old man rolled, tried to get to his feet, face set in shock and pain. Loses His Way charged Bektis with a roar of rage and was stabbed through with a finger of crimson fire from the crystal cap on the wizard’s finger, dropping him in his tracks—the Icefalcon edged along the wall, sword drawn, waiting for his chance to strike.

  Ingold tried to stand again; it was as if he were being devoured by a half-seen holocaust of stars.

  Bektis took a step toward Ingold and said, “Stop it.”

  The lightning continued. Shadowy forms dipped and wavered around Ingold—he must have been using some kind of counterspell, for the Icefalcon could see his hands and lips move, even as he tried to get to his feet, gather his strength. Harsh half-seen flakes of light pushed him steadily back, toward the far wall, Bektis advancing …

  But Bektis’ hands fluttered uncertainly. In the reflected glare the Icefalcon could see that the Hand of Harilómne had crazed, like glass heated and suddenly cooled, the crystal clouded and dead.

  Bektis’ dark eyes were wide with terror and doubt. “Stop it,” he called out again, speaking to the walls, the ceiling, the whole malevolent Keep itself that seemed to be bending and bowing toward him, funneling into the room like the heart of a killer storm. “Stop it! I command you!”

  A darkness seemed to lift out of the rear wall of the cell, dry and ancient, covering it from the Court Mage’s witchlight and from the illumination of the lightning that played and struck and slashed around Ingold’s retreating form. The Icefalcon saw Ingold’s face, sweat standing on his forehead and eyes wide with desperation; saw his lips move in the words of counterspells, holding off the lightning as best he could. Sheets and threads and arrows of purplish quasi light whirled around him like blown leaves, leaving black burns where they touched; cold filled the room, rolling in waves from the dark at the far end.

  And there was a voice, the Icefalcon thought. A voice that laughed a slow, dry laughter, building in an almost silent crescendo of glee.

  “Stop it!” Bektis’ voice was almost a scream. He gestured wildly, and the grayed chunks of burned crystal fell from his hand in bloodstained pieces that shattered on the floor.

  Loses His Way, staggering painfully to his feet, started to rush forward to Ingold’s side, and the Icefalcon grabbed his arm and dragged him back, behind Bektis, toward the door. A final flare of lightning sliced down, catching Ingold full in the chest. He staggered back and seemed to fall into where the wall should have been and wasn’t.

  Falling back into the engulfing darkness that a moment later was gone.

  Ingold was gone, too.

  Purple threads of lightning flowed around the ceiling of the chamber, down the walls, across the iron sides of the vat. Harmless, heatless, an echo of desiccated laughter.

  The Icefalcon closed his grip hard on Loses His Way’s arm and fled.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Keep was alive.

  Blue worms o
f phosphor fleeted along the join of the ceiling, slipped away out of sight into the wall. Somewhere far off, knocking could be heard, tapping and pounding on the black walls in blackness; once one of the walls of the Silent cell on the second level bled a little, liquid black in the dim pulse of the little fire, but red when Hethya went and touched it and brought the smear of it back to the fire on her fingers. She said, “T’cha!” and quickly wiped it away, but not before Tir saw.

  The whole Keep was whispering. Names, Tir thought—the names of those who had departed. The names of those who had gone away. Sometimes it whistled, a sad little tune, an air Tir almost knew.

  And sometimes it was only silent, and that silence was worse than anything. One could almost see in it the lifted ironic brow, the wet silver eye beneath.

  Hethya raised her head sharply. Picking up one of the swords the men had left, she crossed to the cell’s door. For a time she listened, face profiled in the ocher glow that twined her curls with brass and laid a thread of fire along the blade’s edge. “Now what would they be after?”

  Far off, almost unheard and thrown from wall to wall in a distant ripple of echoes, Tir could hear the barest strain of sound: a trumpet being blown.

  “It only needed that,” panted Loses His Way, “to make the hunt complete.”

  The Icefalcon, concentrating on igniting the oil-soaked end of a stick from his firepouch without putting out the hot little banked coal, muttered, “The hunt is far from complete.” To his huge annoyance his hands were shaking and would not stop. Even the short run through the darkness had winded him, and the presence of enemies who might appear at any moment made him edgy as a panther. “Myself, I would not advise you wager any substantial sum on old Ingold being dead.”

  “Dead or living, he’s of no use to us.” Loses His Way pushed back the aureate mane of his hair, loosened from its braids during the beating and streaked with gore and filth, but still brilliant as summer light. “Can this shaman Bektis turn the very walls against us?”

  The Icefalcon shook his head. “The Hand of Harilómne—the crystals he wore that shattered—were a spell of summoning, of focus, by which he made himself stronger. Being a fool, he summoned and focused the Ancestor of Shamans, Zay, he who sacrificed himself to become the ki of this place. Now that he has brought him to life he cannot send him away.”

  Lights flitted through the corridor, pale violet flames that lost themselves among the pallid spill of dead vines and mushroom forest growing from the cross corridor before them. It might only have been the quiver of the tiny flame on the end of his match, but the Icefalcon would have sworn the vines were moving.

  Loses His Way used a colloquial term, common in the Real World, which meant “stands downwind from mammoths.”

  The Icefalcon looked around and knelt to hack chunks from the stringers of dried vines growing along the base of the wall. “The boy might know where that gulf of darkness would take him.”

  “And what then?” demanded the chieftain. “They will be sending forth this decoy soon. Without your shaman to aid us …”

  A trumpet sounded in the Aisle. A peremptory note, the call the Icefalcon recognized from the presence of the armies of the South at the Keep of Dare seven years ago. “It is a summons.”

  “That?” Loses His Way bridled. “Only fools would summon their warriors so, where anyone can hear.”

  “They are fools,” said the Icefalcon dismissively. “And what enemies have they that they would fear in this place?”

  The blue eyes narrowed, suddenly the eyes of a beast. “Us,” he whispered. “O my enemy, they have us.”

  Cautiously picking their route so as to leave no track, the Icefalcon and Loses His Way took some time to find a stair to the second level upon which they would not meet Vair’s warriors, most of whom were assembled in the Aisle when the two enemies slipped into a cell that had a window.

  Extinguishing the torch and leaving only the single match burning, propped against the wall by the door, the men crept to the square outlined in dull red light and, looking down, saw the crowd gathered almost directly beneath them, where the vines had been trampled flat into a stinking mush. The bald pates of the clones caught a glister of the torchlight. They seemed, the Icefalcon saw, to herd instinctively together, like with like, brothers seeking the comfort of their brothers without knowing why, twelve or sixteen or in one case eighteen together, staring stupidly before them. The Icefalcon counted the heads of the whole men, the tufts of white or black or red hair still pulled up in topknots or lying loose on their shoulders: the men who moved briskly and spoke among themselves, glancing all the while at the dark Doors, the solemn lunacy of the water clock, the vast seethe of plant life at the Aisle’s end.

  Such a man was talking to Vair, his voice loud enough to carry to the unseen watchers above.

  “Demons led them,” he was saying, and gestured to two clones standing nearby, staring about them foolishly. Brother-clones, the Icefalcon saw, White Alketch with their fair skin scratched and torn from vine shards and thorns. “It’s a long way around, going in through the back because of that, my Lord.” He nodded toward the hueless tangle of the jungle—though the Icefalcon didn’t understand many of his words, his gestures made clear enough what he said. “But there are no vines around the place itself.” Hï ekkorgn—selfsame place—the Icefalcon recognized too the word for vines. “It’s just as my Lord Bektis described it, my Lord: four chambers leading one out of the other, with pillars of crystal flanking the arches.” The gestures of his hands—one, two, three, four—made his meaning unmistakable.

  “They’ve found it,” whispered the Icefalcon, and he felt a cold grimness settle around his heart. “The transporter Vair has been seeking. The road that leads directly from this place into the heart of the Keep.”

  “How do you know?”

  The Icefalcon shook his head. Vair was speaking to Bektis now, more quietly. “How far are these barbarians from the crevasse’s head?”

  “As I see them in my scrying stone, my Lord, they come on quickly.” Bektis didn’t look a hair the worse for his battle with Ingold: long hair combed smooth over his shoulders, beard like a curtain of snow. The Icefalcon noticed, however, that Bektis kept his right hand tucked out of sight in his ermine muff.

  “Can Prinyippos reach them from here?” Vair, too, was uneasy, watching the black Doorways, the colorless vines, like a man expecting attack. “If Inglorion knows of our presence here, whether he came through the Far-Walker or followed you over the mountains, you can believe he will relay that information to the Lady of the Keep.”

  “My Lord, I tell you there is little to fear from the man now. I wounded him, unto the death, I think.”

  “So you have told me.” Vair’s eyes returned to the wizard’s, with a coldness in them the Icefalcon could sense even from his high coign. “But you told me also that you were not pursued. You told me that Inglorion himself was in Gae.”

  “He was, my Lord. On that I will swear.”

  “Then he came after you, Bektis, with truly enviable speed. Perhaps he was even here before us. In either case we have no time to waste.”

  “As you say, my Lord.” Bektis managed to make a gesture of submission without taking his hand from his muff.

  “It is best,” Vair said, “that the matter be pressed to conclusion without delay. Is Prinyippos ready?”

  Bektis smiled, a hint of smug triumph in his eyes. “I trust,” he purred, “that my Lord will find my work satisfactory.”

  He held out his hand, and a slim form stepped from the door of the nearest cell. That door was almost under the window where the Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched, so they didn’t see the scout until he reached Bektis’ side. Beside him, the Icefalcon felt rather than heard the thick hard jerk of breath.

  It was Twin Daughter.

  Twin Daughter as she had ridden to battle on Bison Hill, when all she thought was that here was an easy raid. Twin Daughter with her three flame-bright braids wri
st-thick over a coat of mammoth hide, her scarred oval face thin with hardship and brown with the sun-glare on the ice. The Icefalcon felt the movement of his enemy’s arm against him and glanced sidelong to see Loses His Way reach inside his coat to touch the spirit-pouches that hung around his neck.

  “I thought you said this Bektis had lost the greater part of his power?”

  “He made this glamour before, to show it to Vair, wanting his praise,” the Icefalcon whispered. “It did not take much to renew now, like a banked coal being breathed once again to life.”

  “Not bad, my Lord, you must admit.”

  Twin Daughter said something to his lord in a teasing voice, flirting with him, and Vair’s dark face split with a lewd grin. The Icefalcon did not understand the idiomatic speech, but the tone was that of a woman of the streets, bantering a customer, and he felt Loses His Way shiver.

  “She looks good enough to bed,” purred Vair, and put a hand on Twin Daughter’s—Prinyippos’—cheek. The counterfeit woman simpered and made a play of eyelashes, and the men around them hooted and laughed. “Of course,” Vair added with a grin, “she did before.”

  “Hyena.” The voice of Loses His Way was soft, like the first cracking of the ice underfoot, when a traveler is too far to reach shore before it gives. “Scum.”

  “She is dead.” The Icefalcon turned his eyes away, not wanting to see what he saw in his enemy’s face. “She lies beyond his dishonor.”

  “Even so,” he breathed. “Even so.”

  “You will go with Prinyippos,” Vair continued, turning to Bektis. “At a safe distance you will follow to maintain this illusion that you keep on him. Mongret, Gom, Tuuves …” There was a stirring—the first man stepped forward, but Gom and Tuuves were clones, and nearly a dozen of each tried to amble to the front. Vair seized one of each name, gestured the rest back as if they had been beggars importuning him in the street.