Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (32 page)

“Good. And they’ll certainly be fresh. You’re to go with Prinyippos and his party when they fetch them and retrieve any fragments of the
karnach
that you can find.”

“My Lord …”

“At dawn, Bektis.” Vair started for the door. “That’s—what? Two chimes of the clock from now?”

Bektis inclined his head again, not looking happy. “Two chimes it is, my Lord. But …”

Vair turned like a panther, a sudden swirling movement
that startled even the Icefalcon, his left hand jerking free the curved sword at his waist. His draw was slow, the Icefalcon noted—it was hard to bring the hooks to bear to steady the scabbard—but there was trained and deadly speed as he dropped to fighting stance: “What was that?”

Bektis had fluttered back, startled, out of the way, and only shook his head. “What was what, Lord?” His voice squeaked with panic.

Slowly Vair straightened and walked back to the table where he had been arranging the needles.

In their midst lay a woman’s comb, black horn set with three garnets. There was nothing in the least odd about it—Vair sheathed his sword awkwardly to pick it up—except that it had not been there before.

Demons fed on the magic buried deep in the walls of the Keep. Knockings and murmurings filled the darkness. Climbing the stairs that Tir had climbed in his dreams, traversing passageways knee-deep in dead black brittle vines that made not a sound under his shadowy feet, the Icefalcon heard them. Lights flickered among the choking plugs of lichen and fungus, glistened on the beards of icicles that depended from cracked ceilings and broken fountains. In the Aisle, or in those chambers where the clones stacked weapons and food, small objects would sometimes rise up and fling themselves against the walls. One man ran shrieking into the corridor, striking at something no one else could see as the marks of teeth appeared in his cheeks and hands.

The Icefalcon moved on. The chambers that had been clear in Tir’s dream, behind the triple archway and the rose windows on the Aisle’s northeastern wall, were an impassable bolus of mutant groundnut and squashes through which he slipped like water.

Vair will make me lead him there
, Tir had said.

But why?

The hall of the crystal pillars was dead to magic and clear of the encroachment of vegetation. So was the round
vestibule with its tiny doors—from whom did they expect an attack this deep in the center of the Keep? The Dark Ones could change size at will. Another chamber close by, spherical and small, a round lens of heavy crystal in one wall that showed the hall of the pillars—the Icefalcon looked but could see no Rune of Silence worked into its doors or walls. Something that by its leaves had once been a bean plant had filled most of one wall with clinging runners and the floor with a mulch of stinking decay.

A guardroom?

The clock chimed dimly in the distance. Warily, the Icefalcon passed through the vestibule’s door, and despite the pain that grew steadily in him, the ache and coldness that more and more threatened to swamp his concentration, he felt also the tenseness of danger, the sense of something waiting for him in the dark.

Waiting, he thought, for a long time.

But even the eyes of shadow that could see demons saw nothing amiss. Bare black walls, bare black floor. From the door he had a clear view through all the archways to the end of the succession of ever-shrinking rooms, and all were bare to the walls. To the best of his recollection it had been so in Tir’s dream.

Or had he, the Icefalcon, shadow-walker and interloper, seen only part of the child’s dreaming memory?

Had there been something in that final chamber, hidden behind the two men whose shadows lurched across the walls?

Or did he dream, too, now?

He walked the length of the great chamber, passed between the crystal pilasters, crossed the smaller room behind. A sound made him turn, but there was nothing. Only the blank ebon walls.

More slowly he walked on, and from somewhere he heard the thread of someone whistling—a phrase of music, then silence.

A smaller room, crystal pillars, a chamber smaller yet. Beyond another arch another chamber, dark and tiny and
anonymous; another arch. The cold in the core of his mind was almost overwhelming, icy panic and growing darkness, and a sense that he trod where he should not tread.

Go back
.

Go back or die
.

Was it his ancestors who spoke to him? Black Hummingbird, who had first slept on the slopes of Haunted Mountain, to hold the shell and the iron flower that let him hear the voices of the Stars? One of the Dream Things—the Flowered Caterpillar or the Mouse’s Child—that sometimes lied and sometimes told the truth? Or something in the blackness, something that was trying to keep him from this final secret, the secret Tir had begged not to be forced to reveal?

It seemed to him that more crystal pilasters glittered before him, a double line of them. Surely there had been only four rooms, three archways? He counted three or four more before him, and a guessing of others beyond.

A trap?

A man sat in the darkness before him, a little to one side of the next arch.

There was something very wrong with the darkness, something amiss about the shape and perception of that chamber and the next. Voices seemed to be murmuring all around him, a mutter of anger, desperation, and a loneliness that had long ago plunged over the black edge of abyssal madness.

Go back. Go back right now
.

The man before him stood. “Nyagchilios?” He spoke his true name, the name of the pilgrim-falcon in the tongue of the Talking Stars. “Icefalcon?”

The Icefalcon retreated, terror of a trap flaring in him, a trap whose nature he could not even guess. But he knew, as surely as he knew the name the man had said, that if he lingered even another few moments he would be caught in some unguessable doom. Carefully, never turning his back, he edged away, through chamber after chamber, toward the door.

The man—or illusion, he wasn’t sure which—took a step or two after him, then stopped. But the Icefalcon could see him between the pilasters as he retreated, see him clearly in the dark: the broad shoulders beneath a ragged mantle of brown wool, the close-cropped white beard and the face gouged with scars and creases and laugh lines. Blue eyes that hid terrible knowledge under wise brightness, like sunlight on the well at the cosmos’ heart.

If any illusion could have called him into the gullet of a snare, thought the Icefalcon, it would have been that one. Because of all people he could have summoned to his aid, the first on his list would certainly have been Ingold Inglorion.

The second chime sounded as the Icefalcon emerged from the narrow door of the vestibule. He hastened down the hidden stair, passed like a fleeting ghost through the jungle of vines. It was in his mind to make a detour and fetch Tir and Hethya, but aside from the fact that they would undoubtedly still be awake, it would do them little good to walk straight into the arms of Bektis. Who he needed now, he thought, was Cold Death. There had to be a way to send warning to Blue Child and her band that the illusion of the hunt they pursued would lead them to disaster. Possibly Cold Death knew it already.

The Doors stood open. Lamps gleamed in the dense white mists of the passage, in the ice tunnel that stretched beyond. The cold there cut his brain like a knife, but he welcomed it: he was out of the Keep, out of the trap of its walls, running now for the sleeping flesh of his body like a jack hare running for his burrow, with the glowing hounds of hell coming behind.

The bright glare of morning smote him.

He was free.

Another war band coming up, he thought. Some scouting or hunting party that had cut the trail of the Earthsnake
People and followed to see what hunting they sought in the Ice in the North.

What hunting indeed?

He would not, he thought, pausing, be able to see them once he returned to his flesh.

It was dangerous, the tearing and weight of exhaustion and pain tightening on him like the tightening of the torture boot or the rack.

Still, he was going to be coming back this way in his human flesh to lead Tir and Hethya to freedom. After a moment’s thought, the Icefalcon flung himself skyward, flying the way Gil-Shalos—and long ago Dove in the Sun—had told him that they flew in dreams.

The ice dropped away below him. Seracs reared like fortresses, arêtes and nunataks traced in black the shape of buried mountains behind the green-white blister of the ice. Higher the Icefalcon rose, through a gray mistiness that almost hid the land. It would be easy, he thought, to become lost here, to become lost entirely from his body. To rise and rise, above all cloud, until his soul united with sun and air.

He understood suddenly that the pain and cold and loneliness he felt were the result of trying to hold the shape of the body that lay somewhere in the Ice. The terror and suffocation would last only as long as he clung to the memory of that shape, clung to the illusion of lungs and heart, the intention of returning to that abandoned flesh. Indeed, they were nearly unbearable now. If he embraced the sunlight and the air, he would be free.

Or was that another illusion of the demons of the air?

He looked about him, as his namesake would look about for the white hares of the ice.

He saw the crevasse where Blue Child had tipped the broken Dark Lightning: no child of the Real World would hold a weapon that could so easily be taken back by its original owners and turned again. Antlike men slipped and fell near the crevasse with the clumsiness of those who
had never navigated on snow, hauling what pieces they could find or dragging the bodies of the slain.

To the west he saw Blue Child’s band—nowhere near any crevasse—and among the rock ridges southeast of the Keep’s bubble the dark ragged assemblage of the Earthsnake People. Far off, coming up from the south on the trails left by the others, was the new band, well over two hundred strong. The Icefalcon flew toward them, effortless as a silver rag of cloud. From the air he recognized Breaks Noses, younger brother to Loses His Way, war leader of the Empty Lakes People. Bundled thick in double-sewn fur and mammoth wool, others followed him: Buttonwillow, Spindle, and Doesn’t Bathe. The friends and kin of Loses His Way. And with them Beautiful Girl, the mother of Twin Daughter—the wife of Loses His Way.

Cold raked him, tearing his attention, shredding his mind. Terror swamped him, and he was falling again, plunging toward the white and blue and black of the broken ice. Gray things and darkness clotted his sight and the laughter of the winds his hearing.

Elementals.

It was hard now to pull his attention away, hard to fight clear of the terror, to remember that he had no bones to break. He couldn’t breathe, and weariness rent him beyond bearing. He saw the shadow-form of his hands and arms that had once been clothed in wolf-hide tunic, in the appearance he knew, torn tatters of ripped clothing, flesh gone and bones bare from biceps to wrist. Something like a vast spider of cloud and ice-fog clawed out his entrails, and he could not think his body whole again. Elementals vast as mammoths walked over the snow below him like pond-skimmers, waiting for him to land.

Go away. Go away. Go away
.

He leveled out a few feet above the snow, hearing them like swarming bees above his head. A flying tangle of shreds and bones, he skimmed the broken whiteness, dodged between hummocks and ridges, seeking the crevasse where his
body lay. The thoughts of the air and the brilliant, hurting sunlight frightened him now, and he found himself crying for the comforting armor of muscle and bone.

Voices below, cold and hard as the shattering of glass. A bellowed war cry and the clash of steel. Light exploding among the gashes in the ice, and columns of steam, hard and nearly tactile, marble and diamonds and then gray, all-choking fog.

Dread such as he had never known slammed his heart.

He dropped to the ice at the head of the crevasse, leaped down the jagged blocks as though possessed again of human legs and human muscles. Tracks of booted feet marred the snow before him, booted feet and those bound in rawhide. Another levin-bolt and the crack of thunder, another billow of steam. The Icefalcon raced between the narrow sapphire walls, hearing a man curse in the choking mists. “Little bitch got away.”

No
, thought the Icefalcon.
No
.

“Don’t kill that one.” He heard Crested Egret’s voice as he came around the projecting shoulder of ice and saw four or five clones holding the struggling, thrashing Loses His Way, dragging him down with their sheer weight. Two clones lay dead in the crumble of snow, and a third sat bowed over, his back to the frozen wall, numbly clutching his belly.

Bektis emerged from the fog, stuffing his chilblained hand, the Hand of Harilómne still flashing on his fingers, into an ermine muff. The smoke of a heat-spell surrounded him, mingling white with the general vapors as he scrambled down from where the deeper gash of the chasm narrowed and ascended. He was panting and looked put out. Even his beard was mussed. “You should have those guards of yours flogged,” he snapped at the little officer. “The fools let her slip by!”

Crested Egret’s expression did not change. “I’ll see it done, Lord sorcerer.” He had a prim voice—he was one of the Alketch who, like Vair, had kept up shaving even in the
wilds and battles of the North. “Which of them failed you?”

Bektis hesitated a moment, looking from man to man of those standing near, then said, “That one, that one, and that one,” pointing—at random, the Icefalcon thought. Two of the men looked startled and angry; the other, a clone, seemed barely aware that he’d been singled out. Before anything further could be said someone called out, “Here’s another!”

No. No. No
.

Steam still poured in a misty river from the ice-cave where they’d spent … last night? The night before? Two clones emerged dragging something. Loses His Way flung himself against his captors like a chained bull and bellowed.

They were carrying the Icefalcon’s body.