Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath)

by Hambly, Barbara

  “He’s safe?”

  “God, no,” panted the Icefalcon. “Don’t be a fool.”

  “Oh,” she said, evidently realizing the absurdity of the word in the circumstances. “Sorry. If you’ve got any brilliant strategies at this point, boy-o,” she added a moment later, “how about trottin’ ’em out?”

  Smoke poured from the vestibule, thicker and rank with the smell of new burning. The air was like an oven, the floor underfoot hot through his boot-soles.

  “A curtain wall would help,” panted the Icefalcon. “Machiolations. Boiling oil.” It was impossible to breathe.

  “We’d have that if we hadn’t eaten all the pemmican.”

  The Icefalcon sliced hard at the next head to appear through the doorway, had his blade intercepted on a two-pronged halberd. The inexperience of the clone that wielded it was the only thing that saved the Icefalcon from having the weapon wrenched out of his hand; he was able to slip in under the shaft and slash the man’s arm with his dagger, then pull free. Instinct made him keep low—Hethya’s sword-swipe at the next enemy would have taken his ear off.

  “Waste of good food,” he said.

  The ventilation shafts gushed nothing but smoke now; the Icefalcon felt his skin blister in the scorching air.

  “Can we ourselves use the Far-Walker?” asked Loses His Way. Blood streamed from his chest and arm where a lance had pierced. “Get out of this place and warn the people of the Keep?”

  “We can’t activate it.” The Icefalcon hacked again with his sword, his arms like lead. “It takes a Wise One to do that.” Blood spouted over him from the man whose throat he opened; someone in the rear rank pulled the dying clone aside.

  “And that’s what Ingold’s gone to do?”

  “Don’t be a fool, woman,” snapped the Icefalcon. “The last thing we need is to open the way into the Keep with Vair right outside.”

  “Well, I’ve no intention of roasting to death to save your lot!”

  “You think Vair will spare you?”

  There was an outcry from deeper within the vestibule, beyond the heads of the crowding clones. The clones themselves—hundreds of them—were barefoot, scantily clothed, their skin patchy and odd-looking, greenish even in the livid light, or the slick, vile orange of the monster toadstools. Now and then during the confused struggle in the doorway the Icefalcon had the impression that one or more would suddenly go berserk in the vestibule, turning on his companions, slaying and being slain or rushing out into the bellowing furnace of the corridor.

  Then a voice cried beyond the press, “Put down your weapons!”

  The clones in the doorway ceased to fight, fell back untidily to show the defenders Vair na-Chandros, his white tabard soot-blackened, a tulwar in his hand. Bektis stood beside him, smutted, filthy, gasping—holding Tir against him with one hand, a silver knife at his throat.

  Vair’s teeth glinted under pulled-back lips. “Get back,” he said. “Let us pass or the boy dies.”

  “I thought you said,” began Hethya furiously, and the Icefalcon said, “Shut up!”

  His eyes met Tir’s. The boy’s were stretched with panic under a mask of smoke and blood. Anything could go wrong in any hunt, thought the Icefalcon. All it would take, in that maelstrom of smoke and heat and darkness, would be for Ingold to lose his grip on Tir’s hand; for the old man to have been overcome by fumes, or fire summoned by Bektis, or some trap in the Keep itself. Bektis was weakened and in no good case to fight, but then Ingold wasn’t, either. The Court Mage would have found it easy to lure the child to him in the confusion.

  The Icefalcon stepped back. Tir screamed, “Don’t let them! Let me die, I order you! Please! Don’t let …”

  Bektis shook him, hard. “Be still, boy.”

  The Icefalcon retreated, sword pointing out, Hethya and Loses His Way closing in on both sides. Vair stepped through the vestibule door, clones surrounding him, their stupid gazes wandering. Some were beginning to rot already, stinking appallingly above the calcifying heat.

  “Good.” Vair’s eye traveled calculatingly around the big chamber, seeking other defenders, finding none. “Very good. Prandhays Keep has been broken, time and again through the years; its walls would never stand against the Devices that harridan wife of mine, Yori-Ezrikos, now commands. But Renweth …” He smiled under his dark mustache, though he was panting for breath in the heat. “Renweth is another story. Whatever weapons we find there, Bektis, in Renweth we will have a base to raise and provision the force I will need to march south and retake what is rightfully mine. And who knows what Devices are hidden there.”

  His lips parted in an ugly grin as he thought of the twelve-year-old girl he had raped on their wedding night, the girl who had hated him so much that she’d murdered the son she bore him. And the relish in that grin, the vile amusement, made the Icefalcon realize that by comparison Blue Child’s ferocity was as innocent as summer rain.

  “I look forward, Bektis, to seeing Yori-Ezrikos again. Is the way open, Bektis?”

  The mage edged at his heels, long white fingers closed around Tir’s jaw in a strangling grip. “The way is open, my Lord. Behold.”

  He lifted the hand that held the silver knife and made a pass in the air, speaking words that sounded nothing like Hethya’s made-up tongue of the Times Before. Behind him the columns of crystal, ranked room to room in a line, flickered with cores of greenish light, and threads of starshine seemed to race along the floor between them. A hot, quick flicker of light flashed, far back in the dark, and the smoke that bellied thick beneath the high ceiling stirred, then streamed inward, pouring between the pillars through the second chamber and the third.

  As he had in his shadow vision, the Icefalcon half discerned more pillars than there should have been, a fourth and a fifth and a sixth pair, and on past into darkness.

  Vair gestured to the clones. “Go,” he said. “Kill all that you meet.”

  “I trust,” said Bektis smugly, “that your Lordship is well satisfied?”

  His attention was on Vair, in anticipation of an accolade that, the Icefalcon reflected, he should have had more sense than to expect—and in that moment of distraction, Tir acted. With the neat speed of a man’s, the boy’s hand dropped to his boot-top and the next second there was a dagger in it, a dagger with which he slashed across the back of Bektis’ hand. Bektis screamed, jerked back, and the boy was free, running.

  The Icefalcon was moving, too. In a single long leap he reached the child’s side, seconds before Vair’s left-handed fumble for his sword. The Icefalcon’s sword tangled with the dark commander’s blade, flung the weapon aside, and struck back the blade of the nearest clone’s attack as his momentum carried him, and Tir, out of immediate danger.

  Vair screamed, “Stop him! Kill him!” as the Icefalcon slapped into the wall between Hethya and Loses His Way, sword pointing outward once more.

  Bektis, clutching his bleeding hand to his breast, snarled, “The room’s under a Rune of Silence, fool!”

  Behind the Icefalcon, Tir was sobbing, “Stop them! Please, stop them!” and struggling to push through, as if he would attack the clones himself, but none of the three warriors made a move.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” said the Icefalcon softly. He had already caught, above the stench of smoke and rot and burning, a smell from the inner chambers of the transporter, a smell green and anomalous, that told him that all was not as Vair supposed it to be.

  But he couldn’t say so, could only hold Tir fast, while behind the shoving ranks of clones Vair struck Bektis a blow that knocked the old man to the floor. Swords, halberds, spears in hand, the clones shuffled through the pillars, disappearing along the lines of green light and starshine into darkness.

  Tir struggled, weeping, in the Icefalcon’s grip.

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  Something beyond the vestibule outside caught with a deafening roar. Heat, exhaustion, and the strangling smoke made the Icefalcon light-headed, and h
e saw Hethya stagger and Loses His Way catch her on his uninjured arm to keep her on her feet. For a moment, when there was a gap in the line of clones, the Icefalcon thought Vair would order his men to take the three of them and Tir—wasteful, in his opinion, but then Vair was wasteful.

  But Vair seemed to realize what that was likely to cost in terms of men and in terms of time.

  “Come, Bektis,” he said softly to the trembling, furious old man who lay sprawled at his feet. “They’ll follow us through. They must, or die. As you must. What about it, wench?” he called to Hethya. “Will you take servicing my men above death by fire? And you, Little King—if you hurry, you’ll be in time to watch me rape your mother.”

  Dagger in hand, Tir flung himself in soundless rage at Vair. The Icefalcon dragged him back, holding the struggling child against him as the tall man turned, laughing, toward the crystal columns, the retreating lines of light. His white-cloaked form blended into the shambling lines of the clones, visible among them for quite some time, fading back and back into the shadows.

  After a long moment Bektis pulled himself to his feet, leaning against the wall and holding his ribs, a look of loathing and defeat in his eyes. He staggered into the marching line of the clones, catching their sweaty shoulders to hold himself upright, and was gone.

  “Hyena,” gasped Loses His Way, his breath like a bellows in the airless heat. “Coward and pig.” His eyes never left the shambling ranks, shuffling, coughing, pouring sweat and staggering now as they passed through from the vestibule and down the length of the chamber to the first pair of pillars, the second …

  Tir wept silently in the Icefalcon’s grip.

  “But he is right, my friend,” the warchief murmured. “What will you? It is follow or die.”

  “Well, there might be a certain amount of satisfaction in following, of course.” Ingold stepped from the rear ranks of the clones—who didn’t appear to notice him—and strode quickly to Tir, dropping to his knees before the boy and putting his hands on his shoulders. “My dear Tir, thank God you’re all right!” Blood covered one side of his face and a fresh wound put streaks of gore in his hair, where the whole of him wasn’t nearly black with smoke and ash. “Forgive me! I never imagined the corridor to the control chamber was booby-trapped like that.”

  Tir flung his arms around the wizard, clutched him desperately with his face buried in the threadbare robes.

  “It’s all right,” said Ingold. “It really is all right. I’d never have brought you with me if …”

  “I’d have thrashed the life out of any man who’d send a child into what we just came through!” protested Hethya.

  “No one in the Keep will be hurt,” Ingold murmured, face bent over the weeping child’s head. “I promise you.” He held out his hand to the Icefalcon and used his grip on the young warrior’s arm to get to his feet. “We really have got to get out of here. The Aisle’s in flames. I think I can damp us a way through to the Doors, but I’m afraid we’re all going to get singed.”

  “Vair …” sobbed Tir. “Ingold, Vair said …”

  “It’s all right,” said the wizard again. “Vair’s not anywhere near the Keep of Dare. In fact he’s farther from it than ever. As a final favor to us, Zay of Tiyomis told me how to change the destination of the transporter before he … he died. And he is dead,” he added, as Hethya’s lips parted in surprise. “He left behind enough of his power to operate the transporter one final time, but, as I said, it opens no longer into the Keep of Dare. That was the Icefalcon’s idea,” he added, and Hethya regarded the Icefalcon in surprise.

  “So you’ve turned tricky in your old age, have you, boy-o?”

  With dignity, the Icefalcon replied, “Something I overheard Vair say while I was shadow-walking made me think there was a more suitable destination for him.”

  “What, you’ve found a way for the transporter to send him straight to Hell?”

  “Nearly,” said the Icefalcon after a moment’s reflection.

  Loses His Way wiped the sweat from his stubbly brow. “Where have they gone?”

  “To the crypts of what used to be the great Southern Keep of Hathyobar,” said Ingold, and coughed on the smoke. “It stood on the shores of the Lake of Nychee, on the site now occupied by the Imperial Palace of Khirsrit.”

  “Where this lady Yori-Ezrikos dwells?” asked Hethya. “That hasn’t much use for our boy Vair, never mind that he’s her lawful wedded husband?”

  “The very one.” Ingold smiled. “I was pleased to hear that Vair is looking forward to an encounter with her because he is going to have one a great deal sooner than he looked to.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  There were spells of inconspicuousness a truly Wise One could place upon a man so that he might spend a day and a half in the camp of his enemies without them noticing that the person to whom they were bringing food, wrapping in blankets, sitting beside a fire—with whom they shared accounts of the game to be found on the Ice in the North: ice camels, lemmings, caribou, and once a pure white megatherium—would in any other circumstances be painted all over with messages to their Ancestors and have his bowels pulled out through his nostrils.

  The Icefalcon was grateful for this circumstance. He was very, very tired of fighting.

  He had no idea who the Empty Lakes People thought he was and didn’t care. Nor had he any idea by what spells of illusion Ingold had guaranteed the absence of the Talking Stars People when the little party waded through fog, smoke, and steam up the dripping, hip-deep meltwaters of the collapsing gate-tunnel to the outer world again.

  Mostly, once he woke in their emergency camp of snow-houses southeast of the ice-blister, the Empty Lakes People didn’t address the Icefalcon by name at all. But the forms of speech they used toward him all indicated that they thought he was one of their kin.

  The idea offended him deeply, but not deeply enough to buy his own death by mentioning it. He noticed they addressed Ingold, Tir, and Hethya as their kin as well. Cold Death they did not appear to see at all.

  Cold Death was sitting by him when he woke up again, most of her hair on one side singed off from her fight with Bektis but otherwise looking much the same. “How is it with you, o my brother?” she asked, and offered him a flat-baked cake of honey and fried insects, a specialty among the Empty Lakes People.

  He was so exhausted and so hungry he even took it. “As well as can be expected after my own sister runs away and leaves me to die.”

  “Has it taught you a lesson about shadow-walking?”

  “Yes,” retorted the Icefalcon. “Never to put you in charge of it again.”

  And she laughed.

  Later that day she helped him stand, and they emerged from the snow-house where he had lain and walked together along the shore of the steaming lake that now stretched for miles along the feet of the black rock mountains. The great ice-blister still rose in its center, and steam and smoke poured from a thousand rifts and crevices in its sides. The waters of the lake churned now and then as crevasses or pockets in the underlying ice collapsed, and columns of steam would jet upward, marble-white in the hard arctic sky.

  “Ingold tells me that with the magic of the mad Ancestor gone out of it, the Keep itself will collapse.” Cold Death folded her arms, a look of sadness in her button-black eyes. The day was warm, for the Ice, and the warmth rising from the lake made it more so. Her breath barely showed when she spoke, and she’d put back her hood, the burned patches and blisters on her scalp showing through a thin stubble of new-grown hair.

  If she’d escaped serious injury at Bektis’ hands at all, thought the Icefalcon, she must be a far, far stronger shaman than he had ever suspected.

  “The heat will burst the stones,” he said. “Gil-Shalos tells me that the Keeps that were ruined—Prandhays and Black Rock and Hathyobar—were those where no Wise One surrendered life to keep the magic alive. They crumbled, as all things do with time.”

  “Me mother said Prandhays probably burned at o
ne time.” Hethya came over to join them, Yellow-Eyed Dog trotting at her heels. Prinyippos’ illusion had begun to come to pieces—Loses His Way had said—the moment Twin Daughter’s spirit-pouch was brought into his presence; it was Yellow-Eyed Dog who’d brought down the scout when he’d tried to flee. The Icefalcon wondered if the illusion might have stood up more strongly had Bektis still had use of all his powers. Breaks Noses and his band, Loses His Way added, had never before had a warrior of the Alketch to torture; they’d prolonged the process as far as possible in a spirit of inquiry.

  The Icefalcon wished he had been there to see it, though during Loses His Way’s account—technical and detailed as all such accounts were among the folk of the Real World—Hethya quietly got up and left.

  She seemed recovered now, though, bundled in the coat of megatherium wool and looking a little rested. “Me mother says she found signs of burning where the stonework was repaired.”

  A particularly violent upheaval tossed great cakes and shards of ice to the surface of the milky waters, bubbles heaving and bursting with fog that melted imperceptibly into the miles-wide shawl of vapors covering the land.

  “That has to be the Keep itself.” Hethya tucked her gloved hands into her armpits for further warmth. “I imagine it’ll all freeze hard again once the fires are quenched. And give all the tribes something else to talk of besides caribou tracks and megatherium dung.”

  “You underestimate my people, Ancestress,” replied the Icefalcon gravely. “Should a chunk of rock the size of many houses fall out of the sky and make a hole in the earth, it would not hold for them such interest as a change in the seed content of musk-ox dung. Nor should it,” he added. “One must, after all, know what plants grow in one’s own range.”

  She glanced at him under her eyelashes to see if he were jesting, and he turned his face haughtily away.

  The Empty Lakes People gave them provisions and sleds for their homeward journey and agreed to accompany them to the edge of the Ice. This was, the Icefalcon guessed, due to the persuasions of Loses Their Way. He saw the two clones many times, walking on either side of Breaks Noses, or sitting, talking quietly, with Beautiful Girl by the fire or at the shore of the steaming lake, Yellow-Eyed Dog lying happily at their feet.