Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (6 page)

“How many are there?” asked Gil.

“Warriors? Three.” The Icefalcon glanced around him,
calling to memory what the terrain ahead would be like. The deepening gorge, the cliff, the stream; the waterfall that would probably be frozen still and the shouldering outcrop of rocks beyond it, narrowing the pass to a gate thirty feet wide. Remembering the wisdom of Gil’s alien upbringing, he added, “They were alike, in stride and weight, even to the way they walked. More alike than any brothers I have ever encountered.”

“Clones?” Gil spoke an outlander word and looked to Rudy for confirmation. His eyes were half shut, as the eyes of Wise Ones were who concentrated on the casting of a spell.

“Come on.” He seemed to wake from reverie and pressed on again, striding ahead of the Icefalcon now, pushing against the pounding winds. “I put a Word on the donkeys, but I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Bektis can use a counterspell …”

“If
Bektis figures out why the donkeys stopped.” She was running beside him, a lean dark gazelle leaping up the sheltered goat trail. “He’d have trouble figuring out a Chinese finger puzzle,” a judgment that meant nothing to the Icefalcon but that made Rudy laugh.

“Are we anywhere near that big spur?” he asked in the next breath. The light from his staff dimmed to nothing, but sparks of blue lightning crept along the ground at their feet, barely illuminating the way. “If I can get a rockslide going ahead of them, we can hold them …”

Thunder cracked as blinding light split the darkness. The Icefalcon grabbed Gil by one arm and Rudy by the back of his bearskin mantle, thrust them forward as the snow-roar in the swirling obscurity above told him that Rudy wasn’t the only one who knew how to start avalanches. Rudy yelled “Damn it!” and cried out other words, magical words, answered from far off above the storm.

“Rudy!” It was a child’s voice, piercing and terrified.

The winds checked, failed. Rudy made a pass with his hands, and cold blue light showed the crowding enscarpments
of the Mammoth and the Hammerking bizarre in the harsh shadows, the glistening headwalls of the glaciers above. Dune and drift snow clogged the way, and against the thrashing trees, the scoured shelter of the rock-spur and frozen falls, their quarry could be seen.

The donkey was rearing and fighting in terror, the second animal dragging at its rein. Tir was fighting, too, on foot in the clutch of a black-faced Alketch warrior whose grip held him almost up off the ground. Two other warriors, who even at this distance could be seen to be of the same height and build, stood with drawn swords, blinking in the magic refulgence, waiting.

“Bektis!” yelled Gil. “Where’s …?”

A crash of rock splintering. White lightning cleaved the already fading brilliance of the air, and the Icefalcon shoved Rudy in one direction and Gil in the other, springing clear himself as a levin-bolt skewered the ground where Rudy had stood and steam exploded from the snow in a hissing cloud. The renewed glare showed up Bektis, tall now and thin in Linok’s rough furs and quilted trousers, arms uplifted on the rock pinnacle beyond the ice-locked falls. The bandaged head wound—an illusion from the first—was gone. Now his head was flung back, his long white hair and patriarchal beard transformed to flags by the battering wind, and lightning laced his fingers in blue-glowing flame that hurt the eyes.

Rudy shouted a word of stillness, swept away and drowned. The storm winds took the fire he threw and hurled it in all directions, and boulders rained down out of the sudden fall of renewed night, crashing against the walls of the gorge. The Icefalcon, very sensibly, flattened into the overhang of the eastern cliff and stayed there. Levin-fire ripsawed the blackness, granting brief visions of Rudy and Bektis, and it seemed to the Icefalcon that Bektis wore a device of some kind on his right hand, a thing of crystal and gold that caught and focused the searing light. When Rudy threw answering fire, the jewels seemed to engulf the old man in a protective coruscation of rainbows. The
Icefalcon did not watch the battle. Rather, with every explosion of brightness he worked his way a little distance farther toward the donkeys, the warriors, and Tir. They’d all be watching Bektis, too.

It might give him a chance.

The Icefalcon was not a believer in luck. No one was who had been raised in the Real World. He knew Rudy’s chances of defeating the more experienced wizard were negligible, and it was doubtful that he could even hold him in combat long enough for the Icefalcon to get in bowshot of Tir’s captors. Thus he was neither disappointed nor angry when a final incandescence smote the night behind him, a riven cry and the sound of falling rock. He thought he heard Tir scream,
“Rudy!”
Then the wind’s force smashed the pass with redoubled fury, burying all in night.

The Icefalcon wedged himself into a crevice and waited, conjuring in his mind the slow progress of Bektis down the ice-slick boulders on the other side of the rock-spur, across the winter-locked stream. The temperature, falling all this while, plunged still further. He unslung his blanket from his back to wrap around him like a cloak, his gloved fingers aching and clumsy. There were broken brush and branches within the crevice, sheltered from the storm and still fairly dry, enough to form a crude torch, though it took him a long while to break kindling into suitably tiny fragments and he had to wait to open the firepouch until the winds eased somewhat for fear of killing the flame within. When he got a torch kindled at last—the Icefalcon was a patient men—he raised it high.

Gil’s voice called out, “Here!”

By the sound she was at the edge of the drop-off into the gorge.

Black lines of charring scored the rocks and earth, as if the ground had been beaten with red-hot rods. Despite the snow already filling the scars, the air stank of burning and coals winked in the ruins of blasted firs all around. The pattern showed clearly how Bektis had driven Rudy leftward to the cliff’s edge, until he could retreat no more.

Gil had kindled her lantern, and its feeble glow revealed a great final scorch on the rocks above the gorge, the boulders themselves split with the heat. Snow hissed and melted as it touched them. The wind’s main force was easing, but the snow came down harder now. The pass would be choked long before day.

It took Gil and the Icefalcon nearly two hours to work their way down into the defile. Rudy lay on ice-sheeted rock beside the still obsidian ribbon of the stream. He had dragged himself to the shelter of a toothed overhang, where spruces clustering on the rock above further broke the wind and snow. Remnants of a heat spell lingered in the place, melting the snow where it skirled around his body.

“You still with us, punk?” Gil pulled off her gloves to touch the long-jawed face with its bent nose, brushed back the blood-matted hair. Her face was expressionless as bone, but she had gentled, the Icefalcon thought, since the Summerless Year. “Don’t check out on me now.”

They had been friends for seven years, coming together from that other world where Ingold had found them, unthinkably different from both the Real World and the world of the civilized mud-diggers in their cities and their palaces. Both had told him of their former home many times, but still he could not picture it, other than thinking it uncomfortable, crowded, noisy, and utterly lacking in sense. Gil-Shalos was a woman whose heart was a sealed fortress, able to survive any loss, but this man was as much family as any she had in this world.

Under her hand, his fingers moved.

The week preceding had been fine and dry. The snowstorm, magically summoned, had not lasted long enough to soak the fallen branches in the crevices and rock chimneys along the walls of the gorge. The Icefalcon made a dozen trips, digging under deadfalls and dragging tinder to the shelter of the overhang, where he piled branches to catch the snow and so form a protective wall, as his people did in wintertime. While he did this Gil probed and
manipulated the broken bones and smashed ribs, ascertaining damage and making sure Rudy could breathe easily. The Icefalcon was personally a little surprised that the young wizard had survived the fall at all. By the light of Gil’s fire he could see the side of Rudy’s face was scorched, as it had been in last autumn’s explosion in Ingold’s laboratory. His gloves were burned away completely, and his clothes blackened and torn.

“I doubt the Guards will be here until day.” The Icefalcon sat back and pulled on his gloves again. “The wind’s fallen, but it’s snowing more heavily now. In a few hours the pass will be utterly blocked.”

Gil said nothing for a time, but her eyes seemed very blue in the firelight. Stars of snow spangled her ragged black hair around her face. She and the Icefalcon regarded one another, each knowing the other’s thought and what had to be done.

“Will you be well here until dawn comes, o my sister?”

She nodded.

“It stinks,” she said, and her breath blew out in a jeweled sigh. “I’m sorry, Ice.”

“I shall do what I can to leave a trail in case some do make it through. And I shall at least be on hand to help should the boy attempt to flee.”

“That’s good to know.” She was already sorting out possessions: the lantern, most of Rudy’s arrows, and his bearskin overmantle as well, for the niche was warm now from the fire and there was wood to last well into the next day. She offered him part of her own rations, which at his advice she had started carrying whenever she left the Keep, but he shook his head:

“We cannot know what will befall, o my sister. Your own life may depend on it.”

“Myself, I think Tir has too much sense to run for it once they get to the other side of the pass,” she said, adding a fish hook and a couple of her own hideout knives to the Icefalcon’s already formidable collection. “He’s only seven and a half. There anybody I should pray to?”

“To your Straight God of civilized people.” The Icefalcon adjusted the last of his accoutrements, his mind already on the ice-rimed rocks beyond the waterfall, the angle of wind in the pass. “He is the guardian of Tir’s Ancestors, and of those who shelter in the Keep. The knowledge Tir carries may very well be the saving of them, should some peril arise in the future.”

“And what about your Ancestors, Ice?”

He’d spoken of them to her, Black Hummingbird and Holds Lightning, and all those silent others whose blood stained the carved pillars of the crumbling Ancestor House at the foot of the Haunted Mountain. Had spoken of those
ki
that could be felt there in the close silences, or heard when the wind stirred the hanging fragments of bone and hair and wood. Noon, the warchief who had raised him, and the shaman Watches Water had spoken of their deeds around the fires of the winter steadings, with the eyes of the dogs glowing like lamps, for they listened, too.

He was fond of Gil but was not sure she would understand how it was with Ancestors.

“My Ancestors would think it only right that I pay for my stupidity with my life,” he said in time.

And Rudy’s. And Tir’s. And the lives of everyone in the Keep. That was the way Ancestors were—or the Icefalcon’s Ancestors, anyway.

“But I have not prayed to my Ancestors in eleven years,” he went on slowly. “Nor would they listen now to supplication on my behalf. I sinned against them and against my people. And so I departed from the lands where I was born. I will be returning to those lands now, but it will be my death should I encounter my own people again.”

He embraced her briefly and then began his slow ascent of the icebound rocks, long pale braids snaking in the wind, to regain the way that would lead down Sarda Pass to the world he had forsaken forever.

Eleven years previously, the Icefalcon had departed from the Talking Stars People, under circumstances which, if they did not absolutely preclude his return, guaranteed a comprehensively unpleasant welcome home. Because it was unreasonable to suppose that any of those who dwelt in the Real World—the Twisted Hills People, or the Earthsnake People, or those other peoples whom the mud-diggers referred to collectively as the White Raiders—would trust one whose Ancestors had been enemies of their Ancestors, there had really been no place for him to go but across the mountain wall in the east.

As a child he had heard tales of the people of the straight roads, the mud-diggers, the dwellers in the river valleys, though the ranges of the Talking Stars People lay far north of the ragged line of mud-digger mines and settlements that stretched from Black Rock among the Bones of God to Dele on the Western Ocean. Noon and Watches Water had told him the mud-diggers were crazy—which he had found later to be by and large true—and also lazy and stupid about important things, and almost unbelievably unobservant about the world around them.

In the warm lands where water was easy to come by and plants were coaxed in abundance from the earth, there were kings and walls and warriors to protect those who didn’t bother to learn to protect themselves. People could afford to be lazy and to make an art of telling fanciful stories about things that had never actually happened, at least
for as long as the kings were alive and the walls were standing.

After the coming of the Dark Ones things changed, of course.

But in the high summer of his seventeenth year, when the Icefalcon made his way east over the pass that now he traveled west, the Dark Ones had been only one tale among many to the mud-diggers and in places not even that.

In that summer the cover had been better, pale aspens bright among the firs, with brakes of hazel, dogwood, and laurel to conceal him and his horse. He’d moved mostly by twilight since the people of the straight roads kept guards in the pass at that time, fearing quite rightly the depredations of bandit troops from the West. In those days the Raiders had very little use for the mud-diggers’ cattle. There had been gazelle and bison, red deer and wild sheep then in the northern plains.

The Keep of Dare was the first structure the Icefalcon beheld on the sunrise side of the mountain wall. It had surprised him, he recalled, and smiled a little at the recollection. The houses of the mud-diggers that he had seen before had all been wood structures of two or at most three floors, or in the South low buildings of adobe roofed with pine poles or tiles. He had not expected the Keep. It was some time before he learned that civilized people on this side of the mountains did not all dwell in great dark solitary fortresses, untouchable by enemies.