Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  It was very seldom that the Icefalcon—or anyone—could make Ingold laugh out loud, but that one succeeded. His laughter came ringing up out of the lightning-slashed maelstrom of the pit, followed by a soldier’s epithet. The metal clanged softly against the stone as the wizard started to climb.

  Wind redoubled around them in fury, ripping at the torch flames and nearly rocking the torch from Tir’s hand. The Icefalcon staggered, caught the vines at the pit’s edge for balance, and then pulled his bloodied hand back with a curse. Driven leaves slashed their faces, blinding them, colder and colder …

  Then the wind abruptly ceased. In the stillness that followed, mist began to rise from the vines underfoot, from the fungus clumped along the walls, from the pit itself.

  The Icefalcon spun, rising to his feet, sword in hand, heart hammering. “Get back from the edge of the pit, Tir,” he said softly. “But don’t go far from me. Old man, get up here.”

  In response there was only the zapping hiss of lightning below.

  “Get up here!”

  A shadow in the mist, forming slowly. Stringers of white hair and glabrous flesh peeking through holes in black rags; the glint of crystals … The Hand of Harilómne? The smell of him, thick as the reek of a privy years uncleaned. The shadow opened its mouth, but all that came out was a hiss.

  The Icefalcon didn’t dare take his eyes off him to see where Ingold might be. He heard the chain clank again, and the chill flare of lightning illuminated from below the mists that now filled the pit. Gil had told him once that the best bet when confronted by an angry wizard was to get him talking; the Icefalcon, no conversationalist, groped madly in his mind for something to say, something to hold this spirit of insane power distracted until Ingold could arrive.

  “As you see,” he said, “we have not escaped you after all.”

  Zay’s head turned. The eyes that regarded him were white pits of mindless rage.

  “I wonder that you will let those others depart, the black generalissimo and the men he makes from mushrooms and filth. He does not regard you, does not even know your name.”

  The old face, wrinkled beyond humanity, did not alter its expression, but the mouth opened a little, showing the brown broken stumps of teeth, and he hissed again. Then the chain clanked, and Zay’s hand flashed up with reflexes a young warrior would have envied, and fire roared across the dry carpet of the floor like a drench of water hurled from a basin.

  The Icefalcon grabbed Tir and dove for the half of the floor uncovered by vines, striking the rock hard and rolling. There was a clashing of chain and then Ingold’s voice crying out words of ward and protection and the roll of oily heat. Looking back, in the flaring crimson light the Icefalcon saw Ingold, standing on the lip of the pit, wreathed in fire and smoke, and before him himself: senile, filthy, reeking, drool dribbling from a toothless mouth, blue eyes blind and wandering, but the face his own. Flame swirled in columns from the floor again, and Tir screamed in pain: spots and threads of fire burst to life all along Tir’s arm, across the Icefalcon’s shoulders and thighs, then quenched suddenly with the lifting of Ingold’s hand.

  The flames shrank to fingerlets in the vines, died to a bed of throbbing coals, though blazes continued to gutter and flicker all around the room’s walls, and smoke filled the air.

  A woman now stood before Ingold. Gil-Shalos, sluttish and loose-mouthed and obscene.

  “Zay,” Ingold said patiently, though he was panting with exertion and sweat streaked his soot-grimed, blistered face. “It is you that I wish to see.” He stood perilously near the edge of the pit, driven back by the flames, holding up his hand to shield his eyes.

  He’s holding Zay’s attention, thought the Icefalcon. Holding him so I can get Tir out of here.

  Looked at logically, what good that would do if Ingold were killed he couldn’t imagine.

  Still he calculated the route, not a good one—past Zay, along the wall where the fires still smoked and sputtered, up the stairs …

  Wind roared up out of the pit again, slashing at Ingold’s beggarly rags, almost rocking him from his feet. Sleet mixed with it, chips of rock, dead leaves, sparks, and stinging insects. The Icefalcon pressed Tir’s face to his chest and bent down his head, blind, frozen, waiting to get the strength, to find the moment, to flee. Trapped by the vines in the corridor outside Tir’s hiding place, he had felt the power of the Keep: the cold, the icy wind, and the water that had poured down over him from the broken pipes had sapped most of his strength.

  Zay’s strength was endless, the strength of madness, night, cold, rage.

  And in the end, flight would do no good.

  Keep him talking, Gil had said.

  The wind increased, blackness at the world’s end. The hate of three thousand years in solitary hell. Cyclone fury that would shred flesh from bone. The Icefalcon closed his fingers hard around the vines of the floor to keep from being blown into the pit and pressed Tir to him until he thought their bones would lock.

  Stillness fell. An angry whisper among the vines. The Icefalcon was aware his hands were bleeding. In the cold black darkness images flooded into the Icefalcon’s mind: the Dark Ones surrounding a camp in open country, the Keep of the Shadow looming tall and cold above a valley where three springs glinted diamond-bright in gray rock. A wolf surprised where it fished in one of those springs. The white hard moon ringed in ice and ringed again with the huge frost-flashes of moon dogs halfway across the sky.

  Men and women packing, loading food and clothing into hampers and bins. A girl in her teens pressed back against a corridor wall in the Keep, a basket of laundry in her arms and her hand clamped tight to her mouth as pale-blue lights ran along the wall into darkness. Knockings in the night.

  A child crying as her bedclothes caught fire.

  They had left because he had begun, slowly, to go mad.

  The Icefalcon suddenly understood why.

  Smoke and mist funneled down on Ingold again, a black whirlwind like a dust devil through whose ragged fringes lightning flared blue and deadly. Wind and lightning drove him to the edge of the pit, wind and lightning and concentrated malice, blinding and tearing and cold. Now was the time—Zay’s mind centered on destroying the rival mage—Noon or any other of the people of the Real World would have told him to flee. But instead the Icefalcon stood up and shouted, “Zay!” at the top of his soft voice.

  The howl of fire and darkness, smoke and nightmare, drowned his words.

  “Zay,” he cried again, pitching his throat to the cutting edge of flint, “Zay, she tried to come! Lé-Ciabbeth tried to come to you!”

  He hoped to his Ancestors—not that they were ever very helpful—that he had the name right.

  The smoke and lightning died. The whirlwind grew still. A leaf skittered, came to rest among the dead snake-skins of the vines. Ingold, driven to his knees on the pit’s edge, looked up in considerable surprise but had the good sense to say nothing.

  Stillness filled the room, stillness and darkness broken only by the flickerings of the fires in the corners, the malign whisper of lightning deep in the pit.

  Anger.

  He felt as he felt in the summer hunting on the plains, when the sky turned green and hail slashed sideways over the grass and the long yellow-brown funnels of the cyclones began to finger silently from the clouds.

  Anger black and aching and filled with loneliness.

  Not one of them remembered. Not one of them remained.

  She did not come.

  The Icefalcon tried to assemble in his mind what Gil-Shalos would have made of the story, how she would have threaded together the half-guessed clues of Tir’s dreams, of the apports, of Vair’s and Bektis’ words and things Hethya had told him or Loses His Way.

  “Lé-Ciabbeth tried to come to you, Zay,” he said slowly, as before him the shape grew into being again, solidifying with a horrible gradualness from shadow and darkness and the choking smolder of the fires in the room.

  “When the transporte
r, the Far-Walker, would not work, she tried to come overland. She died in the badlands, far to the south of here.”

  The weight of the anger focused, mad but calm. Conscious as he had never been in his life of his naked helplessness, the Icefalcon reflected that the problem about keeping a wizard talking to you was that you called yourself to his attention, and there was very little use in being a perfect warrior if one was going to be so stupid as to do what he was doing now.

  The whispering was within his mind, but he knew it came from the sick-gleaming silver speck of a moist eye, peering at him out of shadow. How did she die, barbarian? How do you know this?

  Gil would ask, Was she a mage or not a mage? It was important to the telling of the tale.

  Also, the Icefalcon reflected, to his continued survival. After this he would stick to the truth. It was easier.

  He thought about tracks and trails long left cold. “I do not know this, Ancestor of wizards,” he said. “My people found her bones in a stream cut on the hill that lies three days’ walk west of the great pass of Renweth; her bones, and her jewels, green as spring leaves with hearts black as summer night, jewels such as none of us had ever seen. These we buried with her bones …”

  Did the Ancestors of the Times Before bury their dead? Why hadn’t he ever asked Gil that?

  He didn’t know why, but something made him add, “At the far end of a box canyon, near a stream, where the wild roses first show themselves in spring.” And he saw the place again in his heart.

  Long stillness, slowly deepening—they can find rest in some image, Hethya had said, until they can think clearer and find a way through. There was a sort of whisper in the darkness, a little sound, Ah …

  The stillness spread like the ripples of a pond, to all the corners of the Keep.

  The Icefalcon said—for himself, for the Dove, and for that vanished lady—“Forgive her that she failed.”

  She never came. She never came.

  But now there was only deep sadness in the thought, and that deepening calm, as if the whole Keep might slide over into sleep and dreaming. The Icefalcon saw again those years in the Keep of the Shadow, the knockings in the darkness growing louder and more angry, the unexplained little fires, the things falling down, disappearing, moving. The madness that was Zay’s only refuge from regret.

  “You waited a long time for her, Zay,” came Ingold’s voice, gentle out of the darkness, like the voices heard in one’s mind in dreams. “No one could blame you for your anger. But now it is she who waits for you.”

  Black rage swelled again, suffocating; the air lambent with fire. The chain where it hung down the side of the pit jerked and rattled, and for an instant the smoke collecting ever thicker above their heads bellied and dipped, whirlwinds reaching down.

  Then that silence again, and stillness, as Zay let his anger go.

  I don’t know the way out.

  “I do.” The mage’s deep, flawed voice was genuinely sad. “And I will show you.”

  The Icefalcon wasn’t sure then what he saw—but then one wasn’t, dealing with the Wise. He thought Ingold made a gesture with one hand, sketching lines of light that stretched out from his fingers, past where the wall had to be, into zones of the air that glittered as if jeweled. He thought he saw stars, but they were deep in the earth and that was impossible.

  The lines were already fading when a voice said, far away, Thank you. Darkness streamed back, darkness heavy and breathless, darkness without relief—darkness dead, at rest after three thousand years of madness and pain. From the last flicker of light the voice whispered, Repay?

  Ingold started to shake his head and to lift his hand in benediction, when the Icefalcon spoke up again.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “there is one last thing you can do for us.”

  “I have never in my life,” whispered Ingold, as he and the Icefalcon, with Tir scurrying between them, strode up the dark stairs to the Keep of the Shadow above, “heard such a farrago …”

  “Don’t give me that, old man. I’ve heard worse from you in drinking games with the Guards.” He wiped a trickle of blood off his forehead.

  “And you’re making a lot of assumptions about what everyone is able to do in that scheme of yours.” Ingold was digging around in his various satchels and pockets for something to bandage his hands. “Particularly me.”

  The Icefalcon raised his eyebrows. “Are you not the greatest wizard and swordsman in the West of the world?”

  “What, out of twenty-five survivors? There’s an honor for you. And given the fact that …”

  Ingold stopped short on the stairs, looking upward, and the Icefalcon, following his gaze, felt a sinking dread.

  Red light smote their faces as they rounded the curve of the stair, a crimson glare that illuminated from below the billows of smoke that drifted in the dead black air. Heat condensed in the narrow space—heat and the soft far-off roaring, like the beat of the sea.

  The Icefalcon whispered, “Damn.”

  Ingold nodded. “Damn indeed.” There was no need for further words between them: they both knew what had happened.

  The fires started by Zay in his battle with Ingold had spread.

  The Keep of the Shadow was burning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “You have to hold them.” Ingold stopped, leaning on his staff, which had appeared as an apport at the bottom of the first flight of steps. He was gasping for breath in the heat, and even here, at the far back of the third level, the orange glare of the Icefalcon’s torch illuminated ropes of smoke twisting overhead. “The blaze will reach the Aisle soon. Vair must know already that he has to leave by the transporter or die.”

  “How much time will you need?” Though he would have died rather than admit it, the Icefalcon was grateful for the halt. He was shaking with fatigue, the sweat that poured down his face stinging in the cuts. They had been forced repeatedly to turn aside, to seek ways past corridors or stairways that were already infernos. Twice Ingold had put forth the power of his spells to get them through red holocausts of flame, but after hours in the pit his own strength was half spent and there was more to accomplish.

  The wizard shook his head. “If Zay’s instructions were accurate, not long.” He coughed, pressing a hand to his side, sweat-mixed blood and soot a glistening mask on his face. “But Bektis will almost certainly be in the control chamber. Do what you can.” He slapped the Icefalcon’s arm, as if the request concerned the polishing of boots before suppertime. “Altir? I think it’s best if you come with me.”

  Tir nodded. He had been silent through the battle in the subcrypt, the race up flight after flight of steps, clinging to Ingold’s hand. His blue eyes, nearly black in the torchlight, streamed tears from the smoke, and the breath sawed audibly in his lungs, but his face was expressionless, filled with a stoic resignation.

  “You’ll keep Vair from getting to the Keep?”

  “I will, my Lord.” The Icefalcon laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “That I promise you.”

  Watching them hurry down the corridor, wizard and child together in the faint glow of blue witchlight that Ingold summoned before their feet, the Icefalcon reflected that the past month of Tir’s life would have been considered rough even for a child of the Talking Stars People, and the boy had acquitted himself well.

  He couldn’t track as well as a child of the Real World, of course.

  The Icefalcon turned and headed for the transporter at a run.

  At the next crossing of the corridors he stopped again, flattened into the shadows. Men filled the passageway before him, coughing in the smoke. Torch-glare caught bald heads, naked faces, eyes staring glazedly at the bent sweaty necks of the men in front of them. Someone yelled an oath in the ha’al tongue and the men stopped, jostling, and began to mill—fire ahead?

  The Icefalcon doubled back, sought yet another way around.

  Fire was spreading. Grown by the stubborn, angry magic of the Keep of the Shadow, the gourds a
nd bean plants, the groundnuts and potatoes, had penetrated every crypt, every level, even ventilation shafts and water pipes. Some still lived, knotted in spongy symbiosis with fungus, lichen, moss, and toadstools, and slowed the fire’s spread while emitting suffocating billows of smoke; in other places wizened vines made fuses along which the flames raced faster than a man could run. Twice and thrice the Icefalcon was stopped by walls of flame, hearing behind him all the while the panicked shouting, the bellowed orders of Vair’s army as it, too, sought a way to the transport chambers that now were their only hope of egress and life. The Icefalcon wondered if Ingold would make it through the blaze to the round chamber where the spells of the transporter could be worked—wondered if Zay had spoken the truth to the old man in the end or had decided to play one last devil’s trick on them all.

  Which, he reflected, would be just like the old bastard.

  A corridor lay open before him, walled both sides in fire as the vines along each wall burst into flame—roofed with fire as the fungal mat overhead ignited. Flakes of flame snowed on the Icefalcon as he wrapped his scarf over his mouth and nose and ran, praying the passageway wouldn’t end in another incendiary wall.

  Behind him he heard someone yell. Of course, he thought. They think I know the way.

  Let’s hope they’re right.

  “Man, we’d given you over for dead!” Hethya sprang to her feet. “We were giving you another few minutes …”

  The Icefalcon pitched gasping through the vestibule door and whipped sword from sheath—“They’re behind me!”—and turned even as he cried the words to slice the first man through the door behind him. More yelling, more milling in the vestibule—weapons thrusting through the narrow opening; seize, slash, block. Blood gouting out in streams and a severed hand flying against the wall like a swatted bug.

  “Mother of Tears!” cried Hethya, and Loses His Way demanded, “Where’s the boy?”

  “With Ingold” was all the Icefalcon had time to rasp as a halberd opened his leather sleeve.