Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (28 page)

“Get some men in here.” Vair recovered his composure, glanced back at the older man. “Clear this, and have them start bringing the gear in.” He walked ahead, straight white form glimmering, boots crunching and slushing in the rotted vines. The others followed, Tir and Hethya holding hands tightly and the guards looking as if they wished they could do the same.

Cold air seeped after them into the passageway, fog condensing like a convocation of ghosts. The ghosts drifted on their heels through the inner Doors, over the guardian tangle of vines, and into the Aisle.

Bektis flung up his hand—jewels flashed, and witchlight drenched the darkness and hurled it to flight. “Mother of Sorrows!” Hethya cried, and made a protective sign.

Fully the rear third of the Aisle was choked with what appeared at first, in the hard glow of the magefire, to be a single monstrous organism: bristling, feathery, colorless against the ebon walls; five levels tall to the vaulted night
of the ceiling a hundred feet overhead and stirring with movement and furtive sound. But the Icefalcon saw—they all saw, with the strengthening of Bektis’ magelight—that what at first appeared to be a homogeneous wall was in fact an impenetrable tangle of ash-hued vines that varied in thickness from the width of a child’s finger to cables greater than a man’s waist, of strange-shaped balls of fuzz and bristle that might have been leaves or spores, of pendant clots of moss that had taken on the bizarre shapes of giant fruits or carcasses hung to cure. Molds and lichens pillowed everything in a pale upholstery that glittered with moisture; weird bromeliads sprouted from them in spiderlike profusion only to play host themselves to thread-fine mazes of pale-glowing fungus.

Arms and limbs and tributaries of this bleached jungle looped through the doorways of the cells that faced onto the Aisle and cascaded from the windows of the second and third levels; the whole of the floor was covered in stringy, wormlike tendrils. Where streams of water flowed across the floor of Dare’s Keep, here lay only crisscrossed seams of plant life, burgeoning out of the old channels like hedges and reaching all ways across black stone. When the heat spilled through those empty eyeless windows, those gaping black doorways, drawn by the bitter cold of the Doors opened after all these millennia, the vines and the molds and the bromeliads stirred and muttered with its passage, and the great soured noxium of decay surged over the men and the woman who stood, shocked speechless, in the heart of that vast internal night.

But the Keep was whole. Thousands of tons of ice lay above its roof, pressed on its walls—had so pressed for three thousand years, as if the building lay at the bottom of a frozen sea. But the Keep was whole.

“It is good.” Vair’s yellow eyes shone as they traveled over the cyclopean walls, the stairways that circled up through towers of openwork, the bridges spanning the Aisle, rank with hueless fern and fungus and curtained with gray stringers that reached to the floor. “Impervious,
like Dare’s Keep, in which one can raise and provision an army and laugh to scorn any who come against one. It is good.”

As if in response to his words a chime spoke, echoes resounding, musical and yet queerly atonal, with a flat deadness that gritted on the nerves. At one side of the Aisle a vast series of wheels and gears had been built into the black stone of the wall, powered by water trickling from basin to basin, the basins cracked so that the water streamed down the stone.

To the nearest guard, Vair snapped out an order, flapping a hand at Hethya: “Cia’ak will go with you while you select a suitable room for yourself and the child. Qinu …” He signaled up another man, rapped out words in the ha’al, the Icefalcon hearing (he thought)
clothing
and
bed
. This was something on which he had not counted, and after a moment’s hesitation, he followed the guard into the passage once again. More men entered, hacking at the vines with axes and dragging great mats of them not out, but in toward the Aisle.

At the outer end of the ice tunnel the messenger spoke to Nargois, who waited with a great crowd of clones bearing axes, torches, bundles of weapons and gear. The elderly second nodded and began to issue orders. The Truth-Finder detailed men to the largest of the wagons and instructed the clones in unshipping the vat and its accompanying equipment. The expedition’s priest, with his servant and three clones, bore down the tunnel the portable altar and velvet-draped equipment deemed necessary for the approval of the Straight God.

It was at this point—though the dim slice of moon still lingered well below the hills—that the camp was attacked.

The first person to be aware of the attack was Nargois, one moment giving instructions to the perimeter guards—he, too, seemed confident that the attack would come with moonrise—the next moment looking down with widening eyes at the brown-feathered arrow sticking out of his diaphragm, as if he could not believe what he saw. A
second arrow went through his throat under his left ear, probably before he was aware of any pain from the first, and then the Earthsnake People and the Talking Stars People were in the wagon circle.

Sergeant Red Boots shouted an alarm, dove behind the cage of the Dark Lightning issuing commands, and battle was locked. A stray arrow went through the Icefalcon’s chest, a weird cold wickering that caused no pain. Demons flickered and danced in the fog-wraiths that haloed the torches and billowed pale underfoot. Mules shrieked and dragged their leads, Alketch warriors and wolf-silent Raiders dragging them in two directions. Clones grabbed up provisions and dashed for the tunnel while another sergeant tried to organize a defended retreat; arrows felled them, and fur-clothed shadows caught up the bundled swords, axes, and armor they bore and wrenched the weapons from their dying hands. The priest came out of the ice tunnel and cried something, and a demon-ridden clone raced up to him, shrieking, and sank an ax into his chest.

Blue Child axed Red Boots through the shoulder against the Dark Lightning’s cage, took a sword-thrust in the double hide of her jacket, and slashed the man’s face open with her knife. Her followers and his were running to join battle—she kicked the man out of the way in a spray of blood and swung herself into the Dark Lightning’s cradle, laying her hands on the glass ball at its center in the way that showed she’d been watching Bektis all the time.

The Icefalcon knew Blue Child was incapable of activating the apparatus, but he was the only one that wise in the ways of magic. Every southern warrior of the dozen closing in hesitated—and every one was taken in that hesitation by one of Blue Child’s band, with the neatness of dancers in a cabaret.

The Earthsnake People had made their appearance by this time, slithering under the wagons out of the snowy dark. Some killed, others only seized whatever weapons they could. Though they were still outnumbered by the
clones, the combined forces of the two Peoples proved sufficient to force the southerners from the wagon circle. Torches toppled in the snow, the dimming light adding to the confusion. Men hauled whatever weapons and provisions they could down the tunnel, the circle of defenders shrinking around it, hampered by the possessed clones in their own ranks.

The Icefalcon raced down the ice tunnel through a melee of fog and torchlight, flying arrows and struggling men, feeling as if he were in a dream, except that his dreams seldom featured anything so weird as that glimmering corridor of mists. He could not communicate with Tir, but should the boy be enterprising enough to chance an escape in the confusion, he wanted at least to be by his side.

Near the Keep’s Doors he met Vair na-Chandros, dark face twisted with rage as he shouted orders and lashed with his whip at the men struggling past him under their burdens. Bektis scurried in the generalissimo’s wake, wrapped so thick in spells of protection against anyone’s notice he was to all intents and purposes invisible. But to the Icefalcon’s bodiless consciousness the ward-spells, guard-spells, arrows-miss, and calamities-hit-someone-else appeared as a fluttering mass of plasmoid light, and the old man, clutching frantically at the crystal Device strapped to his hand, had the appearance of a demon-fish of the southern seas, which attaches seaweed ribbons to itself in order to increase its bulk and pass for a being too formidable to eat.

He would, the Icefalcon guessed, barely have the concentration to throw illusion, confusion, fear, or much of anything else at the attackers, so desperate was he to remain unseen. As well, he thought. He would not like to lose someone like Red Fox to a jackal like the Court Mage.

The Aisle was a madhouse, men throwing down their burdens, snatching up weapons, running back up the tunnel. No sign of Tir or Hethya, but among the men, demons buzzed, shrieking and dodging when someone ran
past with a demon-scare. Booted men and other clones were killing the possessed clones systematically, like men butchering rabid animals; five or six lay bleeding about the floor, the demons that had been in them romping madly in the jungles that dangled down the walls, shaking the vines and screaming with laughter.

The Icefalcon thrust aside the cold embrace of a demon that, unnervingly, took the shape of Dove in the Sun and fell upon him, weeping and biting; he felt the pain of the bites but knew it wasn’t real. The pain of seeing her face again wasn’t real, either, or so he told himself. Tracks in the creepers showed him where people had gone, through a door at the front end of the Aisle, into the caliginous passageways that in the Renweth Keep would have been first level north.

A corridor curtained with a tapestry of pallid vines and fungus like cobwebs; a slit of torchlight limning a door. Ancient wood, but still stout. Cold Death had told him it was dangerous to tamper with the shape his consciousness told him it wore, but he had passed through tent curtains and wagon-tops without trouble, and the wood proved no more difficult.

Hethya and Tir were inside.

The ax-wielding warrior was still with them, one of the booted men, long black hair hanging loose around a brown face and profound uneasiness in his eyes. Tir and Hethya sat on their blankets, looking around. Cold Death had told him that it was possible for a shadow-walker to enter dreams, and in fact his original intent had been to scout the camp and wait until Tir fell asleep, then brief him on the lay of the ground, and how they should meet, in a dream.

But the boy clung close in Hethya’s arms, wide eyes staring past the dim glow of the little hemp-oil lamp, listening to the distant clamor in the Aisle. Hethya murmured, “There’s no need to fear, sweeting,” and pushed back his hood from his forehead and stroked his hair. The Icefalcon saw that she was in truth a handsome woman.
Though there was the hardness in her eyes of someone who has been had by a hundred bandits, there was neither cruelty nor spite.

“I’m not afraid.” Tir shook as if with bitter cold.

“You know these Keeps were built all alike, with but the one set of Doors. And even were they not, it’s all buried under the ice, you know. All this”—she gestured about her, to the lichens that padded the wall and the ceiling, the lianas coiled at the base of the walls like the shed skins of serpents—“all this looks creepy enough, to be sure, but it’s just plants, and mostly dead ones at that. They must have grown up from the tanks in the crypts, as you were telling me of, back at your own home Keep. There’s naught in it to fear.”

His lips formed the word
no
without sound.

“He’s a snake and a beast, our Vair, but he’ll not be lettin’ aught befall us so long as he needs us—and need us he does still. There’s a secret yet here in this Keep that he’s after finding, a secret he says’ll get him back into power in the South, and him that furious at his wife that she drove him out.”

Her voice sank to a whisper, though it was clear the guard knew no Wathe. “You just go on doin’ as I’ve done, me honey. Lead him along, that there’s always one more secret to find. As for this …” Her voice grew stronger again, and she shrugged.

“That old fraud Bektis is fond enough of his own skin, and he listened deep, to every sound and whisper, before puttin’ foot through those Doors. You can trust he’d have heard anything bigger than a mouse. When all’s said it’s naught but an empty building.”

Tir closed his eyes, and a shudder passed through him; for a long time he said nothing. Then, “No.”

“No what, lambkin?”

He shook his head, his mouth set, trying not to show fear. His voice was barely to be heard. “Not empty.”

From the Keep of Shadow, the Icefalcon passed into the Keep of Dreams.

Prandhays Keep, he thought, and looked about him at the walls of wood and wattle, stained bright yellows and oranges under centuries of torch smoke and grime. They had glowstones there, more than at Dare’s Keep, and the decayed chambers whose arches and doorways and internal windows looked into one another like a warren of coral were brightly lit. The chamber in Hethya’s dream was nearly as brilliant as daylight.

Hethya’s mother was there. How the Icefalcon knew this woman was Hethya’s mother he wasn’t sure. Perhaps the knowledge was part of walking in someone else’s dream. Her eyes had the look of Hethya’s, green-gold and tip-tilted, and her hair had once been the same cinnamon hue. Even faded as it was, it retained the curly strength and weight, piled in random rolls on her head and bristling with sticks of wood and metal to keep it out of her way. She was beautiful like Hethya, but thin.

“They’re fools,” she said. “Idiots!” Like Hethya she used her hands when she spoke. “They should be learning about these things, not trying to figure out how to extract the magic from them to heat their rooms or make their little vegetable patches grow! That wasn’t what these things were made for!”

“Well, Mother,” pointed out Hethya, “we don’t know what they
were
made for.”

She was younger then and trimmer, and there was a
lightheartedness in her eyes that had disappeared over the intervening years. The yellow silk gown she wore was new enough that the Icefalcon guessed she dreamed of a time six or seven years ago, the Time of the Dark or just after it. She had a child on her knee, a year or two old, dark-haired and green-eyed, reaching with round pink hands to snatch at the braid she dangled in play as she spoke.