Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  But there was always only the rear wall.

  The vestibule was, like the suite itself, clear of growths of any sort, a circular chamber some twenty feet in diameter—he could recall no corresponding room in the Keep of Dare—whose inner doorway would barely admit a man. Stepping into the corridor outside, he followed it to where a thick plug of vine had been chopped clear, admitting to the second, spherical vestibule.

  The Wise One stands here, thought the Icefalcon, raising his torch to look around. From here he works the spells that enable the transporter to function. Light glimmered, as through a window, and, turning, he saw that there was a window indeed, a convex crystal set into one wall that showed the length of the transporter suite, down to its farthest end. Though he had seen no corresponding circle of crystal in the first of the transporter chambers, it was clear that this was where the window opened: he saw plainly the small fire, the dead clones, Loses His Way standing beside the door that was narrower than his own shoulders.

  Hethya went to him and put her hand on that massive back, speaking to him, the Icefalcon thought, though he heard no sound. Loses His Way turned, his blue eyes gentle in the firelight, and sad.

  She asked him something, raising her hand to brush cheekbone and jaw with the backs of her fingers, and the firelight touched her curls with carnelian and put specks of sunset in her eyes. There was a wistfulness there, and a hope that tries not to hope. Loses His Way smiled, took the hand still raised in his rough fingers, and shook his head. Then he brought her hand to his lips and leaned down a little—for he was a very tall man, even against her height—and kissed her forehead.

  But what she asked him, and what he replied, the Icefalcon never knew.

  Tir hid for a long time in the darkness. It was peaceful there, and safe. The moss on which he curled was soft beneath his body, the air warm. He slept deeply, dreamed sweetly of long uninterrupted peace. When he woke, he was dimly aware that Vair was furiously angry with Bektis, berating and coldly cursing him for … for what? Tir didn’t know, but Bektis’ clothing and beard were dotted with blood, and he was flecked all over with ice and snow. In any case, it didn’t trouble him.

  Vair would never, could never, find him here.

  No one could.

  He became aware of the stirring, the angry susurration of the vines. They didn’t stay still. Even the dead ones didn’t stay still. They shifted and moved, growing tighter and tighter in certain corridors. Lights crept and stole through them like glowing worms, and Tir became dimly aware that the activity was concentrated, concentrated in a corridor a level down from him and some distance away …

  Cold. There was cold growing in that corridor, even as the vines choked and knotted tight. Wind poured through them, wind that came out of nowhere, enough to tear the flesh from the bones. Water gushed down among the vines, first in drowning torrents, then slowly lessening to a steady trickle as the cold grew.

  The Keep, Tir realized, was trying to kill someone there. Strangle them, blind them, kill them with cold.

  He was overwhelmed with the urge to go back to sleep.

  “Tir?” The word was gasped, nearly soundless, close to the hidden door of the cell. “Tir, are you there?” He knew the voice, soft and husky and perpetually half breathless, now breaking with exhaustion and strain. The Icefalcon.

  The door of the cell itself had long ago perished, but the open doorway was concealed within a curiously obscuring gloom, like many of the doors in the Keep. Tir wasn’t sure how he himself had found it. Maybe the Keep wanted him to. He couldn’t see it now from his bed of mosses, even with the glow of the little fire he’d made: it looked as if there were just wall there. Obviously the Icefalcon couldn’t see the fire either.

  Silence pressed, a waiting silence, watching. If he answered, thought Tir, he’d then have to do something, leave this place, go outside, be hurt again. The Icefalcon had tracked him as far as this corridor, but the floor of the corridor—far back along the wall on the fifth level—was slick and smooth and would take no tracks. He could stay here in silence. In time the Icefalcon would go away.

  But the Icefalcon was a Guard. And as Lord of the Keep, the Guards were Tir’s servants. The Icefalcon would probably go on hunting for him until the Keep killed him.

  Very slowly, Tir got to his feet and walked to where he had marked the door.

  “I’m here,” he said, and in speaking felt as if he were giving up silence and peace and warmth forever.

  He reached through the door to show him, his arm and hand vanishing into dense darkness. A moment later ice-cold fingers took his and the Icefalcon stepped out of the black curtain of gloom. He was soaked and shivering, a rime of ice on his long pale hair and beard, his face a mass of scratches and his throat bruised black, abraded as if thorns had gripped him like strangling vines. Tir expected him to be angry, to demand why Tir hadn’t spoken up before—he’d been calling out softly in that corridor for quite some time.

  But he said nothing, only looking around fungus and shadow, gray eyes listening, as if he, too, could hear the whisper of the Keep. Then he looked down at Tir and, reaching out—fingers trembling with cold and exhaustion, something Tir had never seen in this toughest and most aloof of warriors before—touched the half-healed gashes on Tir’s face and the black tangle of hair that fell down over his eyes.

  “Is it well with you, Altir?” he asked, and Tir nodded.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before,” whispered Tir. “I …” His throat closed up. He couldn’t explain why he hadn’t, why he didn’t want to go back. Why he was afraid.

  The Icefalcon gestured the explanation away. “You did speak,” he said. “It is all that matters. Did you hide here from demons? They can’t really harm you, you know.” There were claw marks and what looked like bites on his face, and Tir had seen some of Vair’s warriors in the corridors—when they could not see him—and knew that what the Icefalcon said wasn’t entirely true anymore. At least not here.

  He shook his head. “Vair,” he said, not sure if that was what he meant. “I didn’t want Vair to find me.” He could have left it at that, but it wasn’t the entire truth. “I didn’t want anybody to find me.”

  The Icefalcon knelt by the tiny blaze, held out his hands to it. The white fingers, impossibly long and strong, were chapped and red with the cold, bleeding around the nails, and Tir felt overcome with shame again that everyone had had to try to rescue him when he’d been stupid enough to be kidnapped in the first place.

  “Because you went with Bektis?” asked the Icefalcon, studying his face in silence for a time.

  Tir looked away.

  “He fooled me, too. We all make mistakes, son of Endorion.”

  “But we can’t afford to,” said Tir. “You said that yourself.”

  “Some of us are wrong sometimes, too,” the Icefalcon said a little ruefully. “I think your mother will be more angry with me for bringing an enemy into the Keep than she will be with you for being deceived by that enemy. As a grown man and a warrior, I should have known better, especially as I knew Bektis for years before the coming of the Dark Ones. The world is as a rule unforgiving, but sometimes we are fortunate enough to redeem our mistakes. We are more fortunate still to be forgiven even without that restitution. Even, I think, Hethya will find it so.”

  Tir looked up quickly, trying to read the enigmatic eyes.

  “Do I … Do I have to go back?”

  He didn’t know what it was that he feared out in the open spaces of grass and sky. Not the Dark Ones. Not even Vair and his hooks, not really.

  “Don’t you want to go back?”

  Tir was silent. He’d always felt a little afraid of the Icefalcon, awed by the tall young captain’s aura of quiet danger; had feared that haughty intolerant perfection. But Rudy always said, Tell what you see …

  “I just want to be safe,” he said, so softly he hoped the Icefalcon wouldn’t really hear. “It’s like I don’t even want to see Mama or Rudy or anybody
. Like I don’t want friends anymore or anything. I just want nothing more awful to happen to me.”

  What he thought that might be he didn’t know and prayed the Icefalcon wouldn’t ask him.

  But the Icefalcon only said, very softly, “Ah.” Just that, and then sat silent for a long while, memories of his own altering for a time the gray chill of his eyes.

  “Everyone has to go back, son of Endorion,” he said after a long time. His words came hesitantly, as if he’d suddenly forgotten the language. When he thought about it, Tir realized he’d never heard the Icefalcon talk for very long at a time, and not about anything but tracking and weaponry and food, the everyday concerns of the Guards.

  “Sometimes when we have been … hurt—betrayed … Sometimes when we think we have brought our ill down upon our own heads … It is difficult then. Sometimes it takes a long while to turn around and face what we fled. We don’t even need to defeat it. But we must be willing to look at it once again.”

  Tir whispered, “Oh,” and stood for a time while the Icefalcon returned to warming his frozen hands and the steam rose off his wet icy clothing. The thought that the Icefalcon might have been hurt once, or be frightened of anything, was new to him, and unsettling.

  “Can we get out of here?” he asked softly, and the Icefalcon glanced up from the heart of the blaze. “Out of the Keep, I mean? Go … Go back?”

  “Not until we find Ingold,” he said. “That is the one thing remaining, son of Endorion: to find Ingold. For without him we have no hope of turning aside Vair before he crosses over into the Keep of Dare.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  There were five levels of the crypts below the ground, even as there were five levels above, and Tir and the Icefalcon followed the vines inward to the Keep’s heart. In places vines lay like combed hair, wrist-thick, calf-thick, thigh-thick along the base of the walls, under ceilings where molds moved and murmured to themselves and dripped blood on warrior and child as they passed below. It was as if the plants that had once been cultivated in the hydroponics crypts had gone mad when the Keep went mad, growing and growing in the blackness and bringing forth nightmare fruit of shapes unseen in the sane or waking world.

  In the vines, in the fungus, in the frost-locked chambers where no footfall marred the white glittering surfaces of the floors, apports appeared and disappeared: a man’s boot. A hair ribbon wound around a stem of wild roses, the blossoms still fresh. A scroll of strange gold letters. A cooking pot wrought of metal the Icefalcon had never seen. Somewhere water gurgled, and in its voice the Icefalcon heard the mutter of names.

  Demons kept putting out their torches and picked and tore at the Icefalcon’s hands and face and hair while he patiently rekindled sparks in tufts pulled from the desiccated moss. After having his spirit-body gutted, torn, dismembered by demons for endless hours, these efforts at distraction did not impress him.

  There was a sixth level, below the crypts and the subcrypts, at the bottom of the lowermost stair. Nitre gleamed blue on the rock walls, and the air was frozen with a crushed eternity beneath the ice. Tir led the way silently, tracing memories of some ancient and unimaginable errand, and the Icefalcon trod silently after him, his hand near his sword-hilt but knowing in his heart that there was nothing there a sword could stay. At the bottom of an endless stair lay only a cavern lit by the phosphor-glow of nitre and lichens, and in that cavern a pit that fell away to nothing. Wind roared there, and water, too, the Icefalcon thought, and the vines that had lain along the wall the whole of the final stairway spread out and hung over the pit’s edge, gray and dry and dead.

  A bronze ball floated suspended in the pit, almost below the reach of the wind-snatched torchlight. The bronze had been cracked, perhaps with age; stained and green and falling to pieces, but the magic that had been in it endured. It was just large enough to contain a man.

  “Altir, my dear boy.” Ingold had managed to hook one elbow over the edge of a great crack in the bronze ball’s top and haul himself up from within it. His face was scratched, and there was blood in his hair—demon-lights floated around the ball, and the Icefalcon could half see their plasmic shapes crawling over the curving surface—but his voice was cheerful.

  “And the Icefalcon, too. You have no idea how pleased I am to see you both.”

  “I can guess.” The Icefalcon hunkered down at the pit’s edge—warily, because demons would probably consider it the ultimate in hilarity to grab his ankles. “Have you made tea?”

  Ingold got his other elbow up and rested his chin on his crossed wrists. His hands were in bloody shreds. He must, the Icefalcon thought, be using all his magic to keep the ball from falling into the pit. “You know, I intended to,” said the wizard apologetically, “but the stove in here won’t light and the only tea I have with me is a second-rate Round Sea red, which I know you don’t drink.”

  Eyes wide, Tir whispered to the Icefalcon, “There isn’t really a stove in that ball, is there?” and the Icefalcon shook his head. “I didn’t think so. There used to be chains here. They sometimes hung prisoners over the pit with them.”

  “Nice people,” commented the Icefalcon, standing and handing Tir the torch. The boy was trembling with weariness—as was the Icefalcon himself—but there was no need to tell him to be careful. They’d all been walking around knee-deep in tinder for days, and even at the Keep of Dare, where the black stone of the walls would not burn, children were taught from earliest childhood to be extremely careful with open flame.

  As he moved cautiously along the wall, probing with the sword-tip under the debris of muck and dead vines, he called out, “Any particular material or link size of chain you wish?”

  “Well, you know,” replied the wizard judiciously, “when I’m in danger of being dashed to pieces I generally prefer to be rescued with a fifty-fifty alloy of bronze and silver, oval links rather than square, and no longer than two inches, but since I’ve been here for some hours I’ll settle for anything you find.”

  He turned sharply and gestured with one hand as lightning sparked from the wall of the pit. The white glare showed up the lines of exhaustion gouged in his face and the grim fear in his eyes. The forked spear veered aside inches from him, but as it did the bronze ball dropped several yards, then caught itself, almost dislodging Ingold in the process, and slowly rose once more, like a blown-up bladder.

  “It is not a good thing,” said the Icefalcon, digging cautiously under the leaves with his left hand, “to let down your standards.” Dead tendrils of vines clung to the chain like black wires as he pulled it free, the metal clinking softly. His muscles ached to his back teeth with the effort of dragging it to the edge of the pit.

  “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

  “Is there a post or a ring in the floor that we can fix this to?” asked the Icefalcon, looking down at Tir. The boy looked terrified as well as beaten with fatigue, but the silly banter of the adults—which Ingold and the Icefalcon had been trading since their first meeting on the training floor at Gae—seemed to calm him. He thought a moment and went to show the Icefalcon the place; when they came back the chain was gone.

  “It’s heavy,” consoled Ingold, in response to the Icefalcon’s remarks. “It probably wasn’t apported very far.”

  The Icefalcon hated Zay with a great, weary hatred.

  They found another chain—not the same one—buried under moss, and the Icefalcon kept hold of it this time, wrapping and knotting it through one of the rings in the floor. He wasn’t sure whether the chain would reach, but he wasn’t about to trust knotting it to the vines. More lightning burst and flared from the sides of the pit, drawn to the ball by the magic Ingold was putting out to hold it aloft; the effort of turning it aside made the ball itself pitch and dip nearly twenty feet.

  “Rudy says levitation’s just about one of the hardest magics to do,” whispered Tir worriedly. Wind had begun to rise, swirling up out of the pit. The creepers underfoot twitched with a dreadful serpentine life.
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  “So I have heard, too.” The Icefalcon dragged the chain to the lip of the pit, gathered loops of it in his hand, gauged the distance to the ball. “Can you bring that thing up a little?”

  “I’ll try.” Ingold inched himself up gingerly onto the top curve of the broken ball. Wind caught in his long white hair, his tattered robes. “I thought you pitched thirteen innings against Lord Ankres’ guards last summer for the championship.”

  “I was pitching a baseball, not a chain.” Rudy had been responsible for the Keep baseball league—it was Ingold who’d slugged in the winning run. The Icefalcon had held out for weeks against participation in what he haughtily referred to as a “silly child’s game,” until Gnift the Swordmaster had informed all Guards that they would participate—he needed a winning team against Lord Ankres. The Icefalcon had been the star pitcher ever since.

  The chain fell short five times, lightning searing and slicing its way up the length of it as it dropped down against the side of the pit. The sixth time Ingold caught it, levin-fire sizzling as the old man’s bleeding hands wrapped around the links; the spells to turn it aside released the bronze ball from its suspension and it dropped from beneath him. Ingold swung in a long pendulum swoop and fell, hard, against the side of the pit, clinging there with demons dragging at his ankles and the freezing wind raking him. Tir screamed, “Ingold!” in terror.

  “I’m all right,” came Ingold’s voice, half drowned in the spectral howling. “I’m all right.”

  Beside the Icefalcon, Tir was white as a ghost; the Icefalcon pretended not to see and called down, “I know you’re all right, old man, but don’t hurt the chain. It’s expensive.”