Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (19 page)

“They never even listened,” whispered Lord Sketh. He looked about to be sick. Lady Sketh hurried up, a stout blond woman almost as tall as her husband, the decoration and jewelry on her clothing making Alde look like a poor relation. “Never so much as paused. The moment I stepped forth, they started shooting, ran up the steps, swords drawn, with no intent to parley.”

“Now we know,” repeated Minalde, patting his hand like a sister.

Janus muttered sotto voce to Gil, “Like we didn’t know before. They pounding at the Doors now, Ilae, me love?”

The mage shook her head, still standing under the nearest glowstone basket, scrying stone cupped in her palm. “They didn’t even come up to them. The minute they closed, they stopped.”

Janus whistled through his front teeth, eyebrows raised. “So what then?” he asked. “They know there’s but the one entrance. What’re they waiting for? Someone inside to betray us?” He looked around, his reddish-brown eyes
questing the faces of the Guards, of Lord Sketh, of Enas Barrelstave, who stood nearby looking equal parts shaken and indignant, and Lady Sketh who, in the process of enfolding her husband in several acres of fur-lined sleeves, was careful to include Minalde in the embrace as well.

Gil was silent, a thought coming to her, but she said nothing until she and Minalde were walking back to the Royal Sector through the vast near darkness of the livestock-scented Aisle. As they crossed the last of the railless stone bridges, turned their steps toward the laundry-hung arch of the Royal Stair, Gil said softly, “Alde, we’re always hearing how the Doors are the only way into the Keep—how the Keep was built that way to be the perfect defense against the Dark Ones. Do we
know
those are the only doors?”

“Yes,” said Minalde, startled. She stopped at the foot of the Royal Stair, plum-dark eyes wide, pinpricks of reflection swimming in them from the votive lamps of St. Prool’s statue in a niche. “I mean, Eldor said … All the records of the Keep say that it was built that way to keep the Dark Ones from entering …”

“I know,” said Gil. “But
we don’t have records from the building of the Keep
. Only traditions, and hearsay, and tales.” She folded her arms and glanced back toward the Doors, where the Guards still crowded around Ilae. Men and women kept coming up to them, weavers and tub-makers and gardeners, asking questions and divesting themselves of their opinions with much arm waving and jostling. “Are we
sure
there’s no other way in? Because those people outside the gate sure act like they think there is.”

“It’s nothing to worry about.” Bektis carefully replaced his scrying ball in its bags of silk, fur, and velvet, folded up the silver tripod, and stroked his milk-white beard. “Lord Vair was delayed by a White Raider attack on his camp, that’s all. They’re on the road again and should be with us by sunset.”

Hethya started to look around her, but the wizard said casually, “Oh, I’m sure the other two have succumbed as well.” Tir looked around, too, and indeed neither of the other Akulae were in sight. But his movement caught Bektis’ attention: “And what is that child doing with his hands free?”

“I took him into the woods to pee,” said Hethya, eyes flashing with annoyance. “I was never more than a foot and a half from him.” Under Bektis’ cold glare she led Tir back to the sycamore tree where he had been tied, put his hands behind his back and bound them carefully tight, then ran through them the rawhide rope whose other end was knotted to the trunk. “Stuck-up old blowhard. Are you all right, sweeting?”

“I’m fine,” said Tir, sitting down tailor-fashion and trying not to look conscious of the dagger in his boot. “Are the other Akulae dead?”

“Looks like.” Seeing the fear in his eyes, she stroked his hair and added, “It’s nothing for you to worry over, honey. Nobody killed them. And they weren’t …” She hesitated, searching, Tir thought, for an explanation that wouldn’t explain too much.

“They weren’t really people,” she said at last. “They—the things they are—don’t live very long, and they didn’t hurt or anything when they died.”

“What are they?” Tir didn’t know if this information would make him feel better or worse. When Toughie, matriarch of the Guards’ cats, died, his mother had comforted him by telling him that cats didn’t live as long as people, which to Tir’s mind was awful. The thought that there were things that looked like people but weren’t people scared him, too.

He saw her eyes shift again and knew this was a secret she couldn’t tell him. “Don’t worry yourself with it, sweeting.” She walked back to Bektis, scooping up a big handful of her curls and twisting them out of her way on top of her head with one of the jeweled bronze hairpins she carried in the pockets of her coat. She kept her voice
down talking to the wizard, but by her gestures she was angry—angry and scared. She was a person who talked with her hands, and the wave of her arm at the pale-trunked cottonwoods on two sides of them, the slash of her hand across her throat, told Tir as if he’d been at her elbow what she was talking about.

White Raiders had come at them once. Bektis shook his head and made his little pooh-pooh flick with his fingers, as if brushing gnats aside, and touched the crystal device that hung by golden mesh straps at his belt. But Tir had heard enough stories from Ingold, from Rudy, from Janus and the Icefalcon, to know that the White Raiders were still watching Bison Hill. Their dead were rotting in the coulee away from the camp—birds hung over the place—but they wouldn’t simply say, “Those people are too strong for us, let’s leave them alone.”

White Raiders never left anyone alone.

But it wasn’t the White Raiders who rode out of the southern badlands with the sinking away of day.

Bektis was impatient by then, pacing around and snapping at Hethya; it was Hethya who did all the camp work. She fetched water and made food at noon, though Tir, still tethered under his tree, noticed that she didn’t go far into the trees. She brought up the horses, too, and Bektis laid spells around them: Tir thought Ingold’s method of keeping horses from running away or being stolen was more efficient, but didn’t say so. He noticed Bektis slipped the bright-flashing handgear of crystals on to execute the guarding-spell, and to make the fire, too, and wondered a little about it because Rudy had told him that those kinds of spells didn’t take much magic.

When the light turned red-gold and the shadows grew long, Bektis walked to where the slope sank away toward the grassy prairie, the gems still on his hand, and shaded his eyes to gaze to the south.

“Ah,” he said, pleased. “At last.”

I have to be brave
, Tir told himself, watching the line of
riders, the swaying dark tops of tall wagons, the double file of men with weapons glittering in the harsh dry fading light.
I have to be brave
.

It was an army, bigger than the biggest band of outlaws Tir had ever seen. They were all men—unlike the Guards and the bandit troops Tir had heard about—and they were mostly black-skinned, some with white hair, some with black, some bald as eggs as the Akulae had been. Tir remembered Rudy’s description of the black-skinned prince who had offered to marry his mother, back when the lands of the Alketch still had an emperor.

Remembered, too, the name of the Alketch general with a silver hook where his right hand should have been. He had betrayed the armies of daylight when they went against the Dark Ones in their Nests, pulled his men out of the fighting so that he could have his own army strong, left the men of the Keep to be killed. There were a lot of orphans in the Keep whose fathers and mothers had died there in the holocaust of fire and shadow.

The man in the long white cloak who dismounted his horse and walked up the hill to meet Bektis had such a hook, though that was not the most fearful thing about him. He had yellow eyes that did not care whether you lived or died.

“My Lord Vair.” Bektis’ voice had a caressing note, as if Vair were the most important person in the entire world, and he made the formal salaam that mostly only the Keep Lords made.

“You have the boy?” A voice like rocks rubbing over each other.

(I have to be brave.)

“We have him safe and sound, illustrious Lord. I behold within my scrying crystal that your forces surround the Keep of Dare.”

This was a shock to Tir, another cold drench of panic.

“It is well done.”

Lord Vair gestured impatiently. “Were you followed?”

“Only as far as the crest of the pass, my Lord. The
wizard Ingold not being at the Keep, they sent another of the Keep mages after me. I slew him with the lightning of my hands and buried the pass under a blizzard of snow.” The final sunlight leaped and sparkled from his flourishing hand.

“Daily since then have I scried the pass. The spells I laid on it still hold strong.”

“And Ingold?” His words came out like slaps in the face. His speech, though recognizably the words of the Wathe, had a different intonation, the sounds bent and changed and the accents differently placed.

“He is in Gae still.”

Tir’s heart sank, but he bit back tears. Those cold wolf eyes cut over toward him, measuring him as they measured all things and, as they found all things, finding him wanting.

“Demon-fornicating son of Evil. And the wench?”

“I am here, Vair na-Chandros of the Southern Realms.” Hethya stepped forward, drawing herself tall.
“Aniòs ith-bach amrâmmas a teyélsan
, ‘The ignorant speak easily of that which they do not understand.’ ” The sonorous words flowed from her tongue like the magic speech of wizards, and her face seemed to grow longer and thinner, a different set to the mouth than Hethya’s broad grin, the hazel eyes unsparkling, cold as a priestess’. “The girl Hethya, Uranwë’s Daughter, is here with me also, but I am here, I, Oale Niu; here in this place where I stood three thousand years ago, and I will not be slighted.”

The men who had come up behind Lord Vair murmured among themselves, and one or two bowed their heads. After a moment Lord Vair inclined his, just slightly, as well. “I meant no disrespect, Lady,” he said. “And indeed I apologize for the clumsiness of my tongue. The apparatus you instructed us in worked well, as you see.”

He signed toward the men gathered around the wagons at the foot of the slope. It was a little difficult for Tir at first because all were strangers to him, bald and without facial hair of any kind, and he was not used to the sight of so
many black faces, but he realized that many of them had the same features, like the Akulae.

A word came to his mind unbidden, from the dark hollow of memory:
tethyn
. They were called
tethyn
. And there was something awful about them—or about it—something that made him feel sick inside, something he didn’t want to know.

“I trust that the other apparatus will function as well.”

“How many things function as once they did, with the passage of years?” She looked him coldly up and down and spoke in the voice of Oale Niu, strange coming from Hethya’s lush mouth. “Not men, certainly, nor the bodies of men. But the machines we built in the ancient days are wrought of power and adamant,” she went on, as if she did not see Lord Vair’s face cloud with anger. “They will do as they were made to do, my Lord. Be sure of it.”

On these words she turned her back on him and strode serenely off into the woods, swallowed up by the shadows of the trees, leaving Tir alone.

Vair flicked his left hand—Tir noticed already that he kept his hooks low at his side or hidden within his sleeve or the folds of his white woolen cloak. “Set the camp. Nargois, Bektis …” The sorcerer stepped closer, as did another man, tall like Lord Vair, extravagantly mustachioed and cloaked like him in white, his clothing adorned with ribbons and jewels of rank. “Let’s see the brat.”

Tir wanted to shrink back and conceal himself behind the tree but knew it wouldn’t do any good. Besides, it wasn’t brave. When Vair, Nargois, and Bektis were halfway across the clearing to him he was swept by a wave of dread that this awful lord would know all about Akula’s knife hidden in his boot. He looked away, trying to breathe, and the next moment Lord Vair’s iron fingers in their white leather glove had his chin in a grip like a machine, forcing his head up.

For a moment Tir looked into those honey eyes and saw in them worse things than he’d ever known in his life.

Then, very deliberately, Vair released his chin and
struck him across the face, hard enough to knock him down. Tir fell, crying out with shock and pain, and the silver hooks flickered out of their concealment, catching Tir’s sleeve and ripping the flesh of his shoulder underneath as they pulled him to his feet again.

Vair slapped him twice more, Tir sobbing but too terrified to cry. The hooks pulled him to his feet again and then jerked free of his sleeve, Vair’s left hand grabbing his collar while the hooks on their ivory stump whipped around and slashed across his face, opening the flesh from temple to cheekbone in a single vicious swipe. Tir screamed in pain, and Vair shook him, his head jerking back and forth, his breath strangled in the twist of his collar and his neck half broken by the man’s strength. Then Vair caught the hooks in his face again, less than a finger-breadth from the corner of his eye.

“Listen to me, little boy,” said that cold grating voice, and Tir, weeping in terror and feeling as if he were going to faint or wet himself, stared up into those vulpine eyes. “Do you know how easy it would be for me to pull half the flesh off your face? So that it flaps back and forth like a pancake?” He shook him, only a gentle wobble this time, but horrible as a blow. “Or to dig out one of your eyes? You’ll only need one for the job you’re going to do for me. Nod your head.”

Blank with fear, Tir nodded, and felt the metal pull in his flesh.

With a movement of his wrist Vair freed the hooks and shoved Tir facedown on the grass. With his hands still tied behind him, he couldn’t break his fall. His face felt as if it had puffed up to the size of his head, the air like cold metal against the pouring heat of his blood. He lay crying, not daring to look up or move or breathe. Something shoved at his chin, hard.