Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (15 page)

The shrieking of men in darkness as they were devoured.

“Ninety-eight men,” remarked the Icefalcon, resting his chin on his hands and peering thoughtfully through the long stems of the needlegrass on the ridge. (The Talking Stars People did not deal in estimated numbers.) “And more than a thousand sent to besiege the Keep that they cannot hope to take. What is he hunting here?”

Cold Death shook her head. Wind shimmered silver and dark in her wolf-hide tunic. “All I know is that I’ve tried to scry into that tall wagon there, the one with the guards walking on both sides, and cannot.”

“Another Wise One?” The Icefalcon knew that the Wise could not scry one another. He didn’t like the idea of trying to get Tir away from two.

“It could be. If so, it is a power I have never seen. Even in daylight I see around it a sicklied glow, like marshfire but dimmer.” She worked herself back down the slope until they could follow the ridgeline without being seen. They walked along the slope of the hill like the shadows of birds, paralleling the train. “You say that this Keep, this fortress, cannot be taken?”

“It was built long ago by the Ancestors of the mud-diggers,” said the Icefalcon. “The Ancestors of the Wise Ones had devices of magic, as if Wise Ones themselves
were made of crystal or gold, indestructible and able to be used like tools by other Wise Ones. Vair na-Chandros visited the Keep seven summers ago and knows there is no way for human armies to break its walls. Yet you tell me he has sent the greater part of his force east to do that very thing, and he is not a stupid man.”

“He is if he thought a girl he wedded against her will would forget the experience when she came to womanhood.”

There were times when Cold Death reminded him of Gil-Shalos. “He appears,” said the Icefalcon dryly, “to have been educated in that respect.”

A few hours’ further travel brought them to rolling upland prairie, where the wagons formed a circle into which the cavvy was driven. The Icefalcon observed the guarded wagon carefully, but saw no sign of any Wise One riding within. The sheep were pastured nearby under heavy guard. Three riders went out with arrows and spears, circling upwind of a small cluster of bison grazing at the foot of one of the hills, riding like fools in a group. The Icefalcon, lying wolflike in the grass, shook his head and said, “Two arrows says they stampede them.”

“I may be your sister, but I’m not a fool,” grinned Cold Death. “You keep your arrows, and I’ll keep mine. They’ve been trying to kill bison since they crossed Summer Water Creek. They’ll get deer, though, in the coulee, if the Empty Lakes People don’t ambush them there.”

The coulee that wound away to the east, dotted thick with aspen and cottonwood, was the logical place for the Empty Lakes People to be camped. The Icefalcon said, “They won’t ambush the scouts. If it’s Barking Dog’s hunt, they’ll attack the camp at midnight.”

“Only fools would try to attack them here,” protested Cold Death. Through the screening grasses Vair could be seen talking with one of his scouts, a thin young man with white hair done up in elaborate crests and braids, like an egret in mating time; the young man pointed back toward
the hills. “Even without wizardries, the camp is on high ground with no cover around it.”

“We’re talking about the Empty Lakes People. Two arrows.”

“You’re prejudiced,” sniffed Cold Death. “On the other hand, it
is
the Empty Lakes People. I say dawn.”

Despite the camp’s favorable position Vair na-Chandros seemed to share the Icefalcon’s apprehensions. The tracks of a hundred and thirty-five mounted warriors probably would have that effect, even if one didn’t know of Barking Dog’s proclivity for midnight raids. The men slung chains between the wagons and drove the sheep into the enclosure. From the eaves of every wagon roof, and on poles set around the perimeter of the camp, the expedition’s bald-shaved priest hung demon-scares of glass and beads, such as the Icefalcon had seen on the waists and necks and house eaves of nearly everyone in the southern lands. Most of these amulets were of only limited efficacy—southerners being overly concerned with demons, which could, at most, frighten you in a dark place—but the Icefalcon had been aware all day of a faint nervous edginess, an awareness of being watched.

From the slight rise where he and Cold Death lay, he observed the men as they erected a large square tent against the side of the biggest blue-roofed wagon. Still he saw nothing of any mage, or anything to tell him of Vair’s intent. “Do they seek to blot out light from within?” he breathed as they draped the tent inside and out with layer after layer of black cloth. “Will they drape their fires, too, that they be not seen?”

The matter was overseen by a stocky white man, bald-shaved as Bektis’ clones and the priest were, but with a small trim fair mustache. He had the animal stride of one trained to fighting, and the Icefalcon recognized, when he took off his heavy leather jacket, the triple scarlet belt around his waist and chest that in the southern lands marked a professional Truth-Finder. He passed into the
tent, and came out, and went in again. When he emerged a second time Vair crossed to him and spoke to him for some time, then gave instruction of some kind to a thin tall elderly man with long white mustaches, who seemed by the ribbons on his clothing and the gilded spikes of his helm to be his second in command.

White Mustaches shook his head and shook his head again.

Whatever it was that Vair willed him to do, after speaking to the Truth-Finder, at last he assented. As the men were building their cook fires and unrolling blankets the Icefalcon saw him going about the camp, pausing now by one warrior, now by another, speaking to them with his arm around their shoulders, nodding, his face grave. This Vair did, too.

The bison at the foot of the hills duly stampeded into the distance. The hunters came back to camp with three deer. The sky turned a thousand livid shades of gold and salmon, mad ensanguined glories that had begun in the Year of Two Earthquakes, the year before the Summerless Year.

Gil had explained to the Icefalcon that the colors of the sky had to do with the world growing colder and the movement of the Ice in the North, and why there had been no summer the year before last, but her explanation had left the Icefalcon with little more than a conviction that the Ancestors in charge of the sky had inexplicably become fond of reds and golds. As for the Ice in the North, it had always moved a few feet, sometimes many yards, a year. What was the point of telling over the memories of one’s Ancestors, if not to know things like that?

Darkness came. The men in the camp were experienced in warfare and stayed away from the fires themselves, even with the winds that quested the prairie like hungry ghosts. The Icefalcon saw them glance, every now and then, at the square black tent against the side of the tall wagon, from which no light issued. Sometimes after so doing a soldier would make a sign of blessing in the air.

In the coulee the brush flickered in little stirrings against
the flow of the wind. Something like smoke curled close to the earth among the cottonwoods, and above the glitter of the water there, but when one looked at it straight there was nothing.

A crack of saffron showed where the tent flap and inner curtains were raised. The reflections sparked a hundred answering notes of light from the demon-scares on poles and wagon eaves and from the eyes of the men on guard.

White Mustaches stepped forth. He stretched out his hand to one of the men to whom he had spoken at the setting of the camp, sitting by the fire among his friends, and somehow the Icefalcon was reminded of Noon, coming out of the dark with the white shell in his hand.

“They don’t like it,” whispered Cold Death. “Watch them.”

Mageborn, she could see better in the dark than he, but creeping to a higher vantage point in the windy desolation the Icefalcon saw indeed how the warriors within the wagon circle fidgeted and looked about them and muttered to one another. Not one slept. Those not on guard sat up in their blankets, or kept two and three together as close to the fires as they dared. Though they played at sticks—a game even more simple-minded than the dicing that went on incessantly in the Guards’ watchroom—it was clear none of them gave much attention to the proceedings. The Icefalcon experienced a momentary regret that he could not slip into the camp and set up a high-stakes game.

The moon rose late, meager as a sickly infant like to die; the muzzy stars watched through slitted yellow eyes. Between the second and the third hours of the night came the screaming.

The Icefalcon had seldom heard worse, even during the Long Sacrifice.

“Skinning?” he whispered to Cold Death.

“Sounds like it.”

Pressed to the earth among the grass roots, he and Cold Death bellied as close to the camp as they dared. Something moved behind them in the darkness, a wisp of
brightness glimpsed from the corner of his eye. When he turned it was gone—or had never been—but a few moments later the grass bowed in the starlight where no wind touched.

Demons
.

The scream changed. The Truth-Finder must have tightened the screw on the gag.

“Is that how they sacrifice among the mud-diggers?” Cold Death wanted to know.

The Icefalcon shook his head. Out of academic curiosity he listened more closely, trying to sift sound from sound in the shuffle of hushed camp noise, but could hear nothing now from the black tent. “The Truth-Finders work for men, not in the service of the Ancestors,” he said. “The mud-diggers call their Ancestors ‘saints,’ and in the South they sacrifice to them by dedicating gladiators to their names, making them kill one another and letting these ‘saints’ of theirs choose whom they will take and whom they will spare. In the North, in the Keep of Dare, they only promise the ‘saints’ things, like money or certain acts.”

“But why would their Ancestors want things?” asked Cold Death. “They’re dead. And why would they care what their children do?”

The Icefalcon shrugged. “Their priests explained this to me, but it made no sense. There are those who will kill a goat, or a pair of pigeons, to these saints, but this they do secretly, and in the North not at all anymore, pigeons being hard to come by now. When I was in the South, I heard of those who killed human beings to appease demons or to bribe them for favors.”

“You can’t get favors from demons.” Cold Death glanced over her shoulder, to where something riffled suddenly at the water down in the coulee, as if a thousand fish had all snapped at once. “They’re bodiless, and you’d have to be a complete fool to trust them.”

“People in the South are fools.” The Icefalcon shrugged
again. “Most people are, if they think they’ll get their own wills.”

The bright line slit the night again, a red malignant grin. Vair na-Chandros emerged, leading by the arm a man who walked uncertainly, like one whose legs trembled, but the Icefalcon was almost certain, as they passed the fire, that it was the first warrior who had gone into the tent. Almost certain because the man was bald now and without the mustaches that he had worn. Vair’s arm was around the man’s shoulders, and though no words could be distinguished the tone of his harsh voice was soothing and kind. As far as the Icefalcon could tell the man made no reply.

Together they came toward the guard who stood just outside the ring of the wagons, within a dozen yards of the Icefalcon and his sister. “Drann,” said Vair, greeting the man on guard; he went on in the ha’al tongue of the South, which the Icefalcon knew slightly, patting the man he led on the shoulder as he transferred the guard post from one to the other, then taking Drann by the arm. Drann looked back at the new guard and seemed to hesitate as Vair led him back across the camp to the black tent.

A finger of outstreaming light, and the silhouetted shape of the Truth-Finder inside. Then darkness.

There was no further outcry, but when the wind shifted the Icefalcon smelled blood.

The Empty Lakes People attacked at dawn. Halfway between midnight and morning the Icefalcon resigned himself to the fact that Cold Death was going to win two arrows from him. But then, he had never been able to win a bet with his sister.

The first he heard was an outcry among the mules, and the hard steely
whap
of the southern recurve bows, then shouting. He and Cold Death had moved two or three times during the night and were stationed now in a thicket of rabbitbrush between the camp and the first of the rolling hills. They saw men running and struggling amid a tangle of mules, horses, and sheep within the circle of the wagons.
Animals leaped over and crashed into the chain barricades, driven by howling war-dogs. Then the bulk of Barking Dog’s riders swept up out of the coulee, striking like a spearhead at the wagons.

Arrows poured from behind the wagons. Riders plunged out, mounted and ready, dozens of them, old White Mustaches leading with curved sword upraised. When the warriors of the Empty Lakes came near to the wagons, men rushed from the cover of the heavy wooden wagon-boxes, swords flashing, Vair at their head, urging them on. Twenty, thirty, forty men …

“Where were they hiding all night?” demanded the Icefalcon, startled. There were close to a hundred and fifty of the Alketch warriors, outnumbering their attackers where they had been outnumbered when the sun went down.

Equally nonplussed, Cold Death shook her head.

They were there, however, and when swords began to cleave and men to struggle hand to hand, it was clear they were no Wise One’s illusion. After pushing back the initial charge they held their position between the wagons, refusing to be drawn out, striking only when the Empty Lakes People rode close enough to be hit. The Alketch riders wheeled their horses, driving the attackers toward the spears. The Empty Lakes People promptly scattered in all directions for the hills. One nearly rode over the two watchers in their rabbitbrush blind.

“Can he make men from air?” the Icefalcon whispered. He saw enemies he knew—Gray Mammoth, Herd of Wild Pigs, Long-Flying Bird, and others—fall bleeding in the long grass. Saw, too, the sudden thrashing of the grass near the dying and the spots of trailed gore all around the bodies that spoke of demons.