Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (23 page)

“What did she say?” Gil and Minalde both got to their feet as Ilae emerged from the hidden chamber in the crypt. The young mage stood in the doorway for a moment, a tall gawky girl, and gestured with one long-fingered hand that she was all right.

Encountering Brycothis, the mage spirit who dwelled in the heart of the Keep, was, Rudy had told Gil, frequently a disorienting experience.

Both Rudy and Ingold had tried to describe what it was like; Gil had the impression it was something only fully understood by another mage. Brycothis herself—Gil had seen her image in half a dozen of the ancient record crystals, a rangy woman with smiling eyes and the tattooed scalp of a wizard of those days—had long ago transmuted into something far other than human, a pattern of memories and power whose center lay in the heart of the crypts. Those who entered that center, whose minds touched hers, experienced different things at different times.

“Did she speak to you?” Not that Brycothis actually spoke. Minalde led the girl to the bottom step of the hidden stairway, where she and Gil had waited, and made her sit down.

“Oh, yes.” Ilae nodded hesitantly. “I mean, I saw things.
She was there.” She nodded quick thanks as Gil handed her the flask of tisane—now lukewarm—she and Alde had been sharing. “But I didn’t understand what I saw.”

Gil and Alde were silent. Shy and slow-spoken at the best of times, Ilae thought for a while, then said, “I asked her, was there another way into the Keep. And I saw …” She spread out her hands helplessly. “I saw the laundry room up on the third level, back behind the sanctuary of the Church.”

“The laundry room?” Gil almost laughed.

Minalde asked worriedly, “Are you sure?” Not because she thought Ilae would have been mistaken about anything she saw—wizards as a rule didn’t make that kind of error—but simply because it made no sense.

“Sure as I’m sitting, m’Lady.”

“But it’s in the middle of the Keep,” said Alde, baffled. “You couldn’t have a secret passage going into it without it passing through my bedroom, or the sanctuary, or Lord Ankres’ storerooms …”

“Christ, are we going to have to take measurements?” Gil asked, appalled. “That whole area behind the Aisle has been so changed and remodeled, with walls and cells partitioned and knocked together and new corridors put through, we’ll never get an accurate reading. There’s a dozen secret passages there already, going from one set of rooms to another. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“And in any case the entry has to be at or near ground level,” Minalde protested. “Which means a stairway—maybe in the outer wall? At least we know it’s in the rear quarter of the Keep.”

“But who would have known of it?” Ilae asked. “And who’d Vair get to turn traitor? And how? It ain’t like there’s a stranger come, or anybody gone recently.”

“If it exists at all,” said Gil softly. “I’ll tell Janus and we can make a search, and it better be a damn quiet one because the fewer people who know about this one the better. But if there’s another doorway, I’m betting it’s one
only a wizard can see. That means you, Ilae, and Wend outside. You up for it?”

“I have to be,” Ilae said simply. “Don’t I?”

She corked the flask and got to her feet, preceding them up the snail-shell curl of the stair, the witchlight with which she had illuminated the chamber drifting ahead. Gil and Alde followed more slowly, Alde thriftily blowing out their single candle. The witchlight salted the embroidery of her overgown with sharp white sparks and glinted in the pins that held back her long hair.

When Ilae got farther ahead of them, Alde asked Gil, “Do you think there’s a doorway somewhere behind the Aisle? Hidden by spells?”

“I think we’d better look for one,” said Gil. “But no. I think it’s something different. Something else.”

He was the only person who could warn them.

Tir pulled the furs of his little bed nest closer around him and listened to the howling of the wind. It blew strong enough down from the glacier to rock the wagon on its new-made runners, and now and then it shrieked, like the ghost of a tormented man.

He had worked out, pretty much, what he had to do, and he would sooner have walked up and spit in Vair’s face than go through with it.

The night was bitterly cold. Maybe too cold to get out of his furs. He might freeze to death. It sounded like a comforting alternative.

He was the only person who knew about the
chen yekas
—that was the term for the machine he’d seen that afternoon, the terrible thing that spit, instead of fire, that cruel strange streak of purplish nonlight. The word was clear in his mind, clear as his sister’s name. He was the only person who knew the secret of Vair’s
tethyn
warriors, though Vair and Hethya used another word for them that was what Hethya said Oale Niu called them. But
tethyn
was what they had called them back in the deeps of time that his ancestor remembered.

He was the only person who knew the most terrible secret of how it might be possible for him to warn the Keep.

And there was no way out of doing what he knew he was going to have to do.

Before she’d gone out Hethya had untied his wrists. Even though she bandaged them carefully they were always raw and bleeding. Lord Vair checked the spancels on them every day. The thought that Hethya would get in trouble for giving him that fragment of comfort, that scrap of dignity, tormented him. If Lord Vair ever found out about the knife in his boot it would mean a beating—worse than a beating—not only for Tir but for Hethya, too.

But Rudy was dead. His mother was dead, too, Bektis had told him, dead of grief because he, Tir, had been such a fool as to go with Bektis out of the Keep.

It was all his fault. If it was just him, he would deserve everything, including death.

But Wend and Ilae would still be at the Keep. And Ingold was out there, too, somewhere, and those two young wizards would have contacted the old man, first thing, in their magic crystals. At the Keep they still had a chance.

Tir took a deep breath.

Like everyone else in the camp he slept in most of his clothes. Cautiously, moving the way the Guards had taught him, he found his heavy jacket by touch. He’d put it in the same place every night: the Icefalcon had told him about that. No light penetrated the blankets hung over the back and front of the wagon-covers against the cold. He edged among the bags and packets of food, the bundled, dirty-smelling clothes that they’d stripped off the poor
tethyn
when they died. He eased the jacket to him and slithered into it, checked that his mittens were in the pockets, and pulled on both his fleece cap and the jacket’s hood. Rudy had told him many times that the world was getting colder and that the lands near the Ice in the North were colder even than Renweth Vale in winter; Tir could not remember being so cold in his life.

In another life, he thought … One of those other little
boys had been this cold. Maybe several. He didn’t recall clearly, and sometimes he knew that he didn’t want to. He put on his mittens. He was trembling, and the dull ache in the pit of his stomach that never seemed to go away was a churning agony now, but he knew he didn’t have much time. Hethya would be back, at least.

He wadded up his pillow and a blanket to make it look as if he were still buried under the covers. Then he slipped to the back of the wagon and listened.

The guard was there. After several minutes he heard him cough. Somewhere a mule brayed, mournful despite its blankets in the icy cold. The scrunch of footfalls, and a man’s voice said, “Ugal,” in greeting, the guard’s name, the big handsome young man who’d given him the dates.

“Pijek.” Pijek was one of the sergeants.

Sometimes after Lord Vair had mistreated Tir, Ugal sent him bits of dried fruits or sweets but had never actively taken his part—in fact he sometimes explained why what Lord Vair was doing was for Tir’s own good. Tir didn’t blame him, but he couldn’t eat the sweets. Most of the time he felt so sick with terror that he couldn’t eat at all.

Ugal asked, “Has he finished?”

“Still making the rounds.” At least that’s what Tir thought Pijek said; the man had an accent of some kind, and Tir’s grasp of the ha’al, though enormously improved, was far from perfect. “He’s asked Yantres and Nicor and Tuuves, Hastroaal and Ti Men …” Tir knew most of the men of whom they spoke. “Near a score.”

“There going to be another fight?”

“Seems like. Nicor said they caught sign of savages. If”—there was a phrase Tir didn’t know—“we’re going to need all the men we can get.”

Savages. White Raiders
.

Tir groped his way back along the long side of the wagon, carefully shifting the sacks of parched corn and beans aside. His small body wriggled easily between them, until his hands encountered the wooden side itself. It took only seconds to work loose the inner coverings and
worm up under them, over the side of the wagon, under the outer covering, and to let himself drop.

The drop wasn’t nearly as far as it had been when the wagon-box was up on wheels. The runners provided better cover, too. After the wagon’s dark, the reflected torchlight from the camp seemed bright, the cold cosmic. Tir crouched in the shadows, heart pounding so hard he could barely breathe, orienting himself.

He was on the outside of the circle of wagons. He knew he would be—they always brought them around in a ring the same way. Slunch glowed on the dark slopes of the flooded valley through which they’d worked their way for the past three days. Above them the glacier towered, not a single wall like St. Prathhes’ Glacier in Renweth Vale, but a rampart of ice, a universe of cold, slowly devouring the world. He could see where it lay between the Big Guardian and the Little (and some other boy whispered in his mind the names they had borne all those years ago), the land at its feet drowned in milky, shallow pools.

The Ice in the North.

Men stood guard around the perimeter of the camp. Lord Vair’s men, his chosen legions, loyal to him, loving him despite what he did to them. Their black helmets were decorated with his bronze peacock crest, through which their hair—white or black, like horsetails—rose in fluttering pennons. The last of the
tethyn
had died yesterday afternoon, though they’d been stumbling for days. Tir thought about the White Raiders, and the fewness of the men left.

Dimly, Tir was aware that a magician, with the right equipment, could make
tethyn
out of men. Someone in another life, someone in the dark of his memory, had seen it done. As he watched Lord Nargois walk from guard to guard, touching this man on the shoulder, speaking gently to that man, he knew that was what the old man was planning to do now.

He’d seen it done. He knew he’d seen it done. Somewhere … someone …

And he knew he didn’t ever want to see it again.

But he had to, so he could tell Ingold what was going on.

That was what Janus, and Gil, and the Guards all said, when they talked about war and scouting in the watchroom after training was done. “If you’re alone and can’t do anything else,” Gil had said once, gesturing with those thin strong hands—broken fingers taped together, wrists strapped up in leather—“don’t be a hero. Don’t get yourself killed. Just observe everything you can in as much detail as you can, so you can report back.”

She’d been talking to a couple of the new kids, the young men and women just being trained in the hard school of warfare; she hadn’t even been aware of Tir sitting quietly in the corner by the hearth. “Something that may not look important to you may be a critical piece of information to someone who knows something else.”

Ingold would know how to save the Keep.

Tir crawled forward among the shadows, circling until he reached the largest wagon, the one that was connected to the black tent. He’d seen Lord Vair already, coming out of the tent, pausing to talk to Nargois and to Shakas Kar, the southern Truth-Finder with his shaven head and his nasty little hard smile and his crimson belts. Men were dragging a sledge across the camp from the supply lines, the smell of carrion suffocating: it contained the bodies of all the
tethyn
who had died, some of them many days ago.

“Take it in.” Lord Vair gestured with the whip that never left him. He never used his right hand, his hook hand, keeping it instead in the folds of sleeve and cloak, as though that whole arm had been consecrated to evil and shame. Ugal and others had told Tir that their lord had lost his hand in cavalry training in his youth, which had for years disbarred him from military command, until the coming of the Dark. “He would have had honor and glory years ago but for that,” Ugal had said, apologizing for the commander he loved. “You can see why he is angry.”

The tent stirred already with activity, and Tir smelled
from it the dusty stink of the dead sheep and the thick loamy pong of dirt, choking in the fire-touched dark.

“My Lord, I must protest.” Bektis appeared from between the wagons, bundled in a velvet coat lined with mammoth wool that came down to his heels. He had a muff of white fur on one hand, the hand where he wore the jeweled Device all the time now, and a dozen sables wrapped around his neck.

“We know how to operate the
dethken iares …” Only that wasn’t the real name of the thing in the tent
, thought Tir.
It was called a
chknaïes.
Who had known that?
“…     with a single … ah”—he glanced at the young guardsman standing nearby—“source.” He took Lord Vair’s arm, led him a little apart, closer to the wagon beneath which Tir crouched. More softly, he went on, “My Lord, I cannot vouch for what might happen.”

“It is your business to know what will happen,” snapped Vair. “I thought you claimed expertise in this matter, sorcerer. I thought you said you knew everything of such machines and of the mages who created them.” The razor-edged voice sank soft, turning Tir’s belly cold and sick. “Is this not then the case?”

“Of course it is the case,” Bektis replied quickly. “It’s just that it was not considered safe …”

“Flesh is flesh,” replied Vair. “Did you not say that the dead flesh is multiplied within the vat? That it can only duplicate itself so far with the substance of the victim, but that the machine knows the image of that which is to be created? Is this not then how it works?”