05 Icefalcons Quest d-5

by Barbara Hambly

  He stepped into the tunnel's fog.

  The walls were slick ice, melted and frozen hard again, and blue as sapphire. The floor slanted downward, straight as if ruled, vanishing into dense fog and darkness.

  The ceiling dripped with water condensed from the steam, and the clones hurried past, water steaming and sloshing from the buckets they bore. Gil had described such a place in the heart of the Saycotl Xyam, the cursed mountain in the South, and the Icefalcon wondered if Vair na-Chandros sought here the same kinds of demons that had dwelled in those terrible caves.

  Vair and Nargois strode past him in the mist, torches haloed in woolly yellow light; Hethya walked behind. "Can you see it?" Vair called out.

  Fog hid them, but for fidgeting shapes in the saturated ocher glow. "There, me Lord. Look where the runes catch the light. We give it another burst, a short little one-a foot, maybe."

  "Don't be absurd, woman, we'll destroy them and then where will we be?"

  "For sure your Bektis has never cooked, then. You can tamper with the heat, surely. It's a thing he operates with his mind, after all. Can't he be stopping at a foot?"

  A warrior emerged from the choking brume, reflections from his torch frolicking through the mirror-smooth walls as if an army of lampbearing demons ran through the ice on either side.

  Hethya followed him, and Lord Vair, their breaths visible in the cold that flowed down into the tunnel from without. Hethya's round, jovial face had thinned with the journey across the ice, and there were smudges of weariness below her eyes. Vair looked like a snake mummified in pitch.

  The Icefalcon hesitated, looking back into the dripping vapors, then turned and followed them out again.

  "You call this a tisane?" Bektis waved the boiled-leather cup at a stone-faced guard. "The dishwater of a poor man's house is stronger! If... My Lord," he turned expressively to Vair, with the air of a man more put upon than human flesh can bear. "My Lord, might I please, please prevail upon your goodness to instruct your fool of a cook not to drown these tisanes in bergamot! They're undrinkable, absolutely undrinkable!"

  Vair took it, tasted, and threw it in the guard's face, adding a terse instruction in the ha'al tongue in which the Icefalcon was fairly sure he caught the word flog.

  To Bektis, Vair said, "Hethya claims that as a sorcerer you should be able to shorten the beam of this apparatus with your mind."

  He tapped the gold and iron of the intricate frame. It flickered with quicksilver brightness, and the Icefalcon had the renewed sensation that it was a living thing, attentive, waiting to hunt again.

  "We can see it through the ice," explained Hethya. "I'd say a foot of ice, not more. Melt it off within an inch or two and we can go after it with hammers."

  Bektis looked momentarily nonplussed.

  "The beams won't hurt it." Tir stood beside the Dark Lightning's cradle, flanked by two guards, bruised face white and pinched around huge, hollowed eyes. His voice sounded distant, as if he slipped for a moment into some faraway dream. "Nothing will hurt it."

  "Pray your recollection is correct, boy," said Vair, and Tir shivered, the movement of his eyes to the big man's face saying everything about what the past month had been like. "Can you do this, sorcerer?"

  "Of a certainty, my illustrious Lord." Bektis drew himself up with an air of injury not noticeable prior to Tir's reassurance that whatever lay within the Ice would not be damaged by Bektis' miscalculation. "A foot, you said?"

  He stroked his beard, the huge crystals on his hand shining among the niveous river of silk. "Perhaps it would be best to touch it with the beams to a distance of ten inches or so and have the men remove the final few inches with hammers." He nodded grave approval of his own wisdom. "I believe that would be best."

  Hethya rolled her eyes.

  Bektis drew a few deep breaths, as if collecting his strength for some mighty effort, then with dramatic suddenness spread his hands.

  The crystals flashed in the last pastel whispers of daylight. With disembodied eyes, the Icefalcon saw the cold blue energies that came flickering out of the ice from unknown depths, saw the crystals in the iron nets stream with sparks as they drew in the forces of the airheard, too, a kind of dry, crinkling glitter, like galaxies of suspended needles brushed by wind.

  Bektis shut his eyes-If he thought he could get away with crying 'Abracadabra" like a street-conjurer, he'd do it, reflected the Icefalcon, and laid his hands on the bubble-thin ball of iridescent glass that seemed to be the apparatus' heart...

  The Icefalcon saw the energies flash and change. With a vibration that tore at his nerves, he felt the beam of darkness lance out, a touch, a breath; a hissing deep within the tunnel, white light glaring in the clouds of mist, and steam rolled out, a dragon's sneeze. Then Hethya took a torch from a guard and strode down into the mists, and, at Vair's signal, the two warriors followed, axes in their hands.

  Her voice floated back, "We've got it!"

  Vair took Tir by the hand; the boy's face went rigid as carved bone at the touch. Even Bektis disentangled himself from the latticed gold and iron and followed them into the luminous blue tunnel, leaving the guard who had come up at that moment with a second tisane to stand waiting, cup steaming in hand.

  Like a cat's ghost the Icefalcon trod softly in their wake.

  The tunnel itself was close to a hundred feet long, and mist reduced visibility to inches. Voices echoed wetly; there was a dripping of water, the crunch of axes, and the thin splish of a boot in a puddle. Clones bore dripping buckets past, and though there was no perceptible sensation of heat, the air felt damper.

  Shapes clarified in the vapors, and the Icefalcon arrived at last at the tunnel's end and saw what it was that Vair sought.

  Even as men chipped at the edges of the ice, white rime was forming again on what the Icefalcon could see was a pair of enormous, coal-black doors. It seemed to him that he could see, too, through the heat-cleared ice, the black wall in which they were set. It stretched away on either side, vanishing into the glacier's green eternal midnight.

  Black wall, black door, untouched and unscathable, and underfoot, beneath a heap of ice shards and mush, the suggestion of steps leading down.

  The goal of the journey was a Keep, long ago covered over by the Ice in the North.

  "Open it, child." Vair's voice clanged on the diamond silence, a hammer affixing shackles, an ax striking a door.

  The Icefalcon, a wary distance from Bektis, could see Tir trembling, his breath a plume in the light of torches and magic. "They open out," he said, his voice tiny in the stillness of watching, of awe. "If they weren't locked from inside, it still took a wizard to open them."

  "Lord Wizard?"

  Bektis self-consciously adjusted the crystals on his hand-the Icefalcon wondered whether the wizard had had that look of haggard thinness, of wasted flesh and waxen skin, the last time he had seen him close.

  He made a great flourish of his arms and a dozen graceful gyres with wrists and fingers, lights sparkling and leaping from the gems he bore. The right-hand leaf of the dark portal grated against the ice where it hadn't been completely cleared. A shower of scrapings rained to the muck and water and refreezing slush.

  Everyone stepped back.

  The slit of darkness was like looking into the deepest heart of the earth, where the Dream Things wait forever. Bektis made another gesture, outer sleeves emphasizing his thin arms. The slit widened.

  The smell rolled forth. "Mother of Mercy!" Hethya coughed and gagged.

  Foul and green and thick as soup in the air, it seemed to clog the lungs like sewer water, a summer-smell of garbage long forgotten, borne on a rolling wave of heat that made the fog swirl and then thicken still more.

  At the same moment a tendril of vine dropped through the crack of darkness: gray, desiccated, bearing on it still the deformed pads of what might have been skeleton leaves, the bumpy and twisted nodules of what could, three thousand years ago, have been fruit.

  After a second of shoc
ked stillness, Bektis sent witchlight drifting through the doors. It showed those closest the tunnel that would lead to the inner doors.

  Vair said, "Good God!"

  But what lay beyond, thought the Icefalcon, was not something that had ever been created by any god-at least by none that could by any stretch of imagination be called good.

  Like a second door behind the first, the passage was barricaded with vines. They had a shiny look in the white witchlight, like the scarred flesh of a mummy's fingers: dried, withered, even in death tough as wires when the guards came hesitantly forward and hewed at them with their swords.

  They sheeted the floor and walls above an indescribable mulch underfoot of vines, leaves, and fruit from which white ferns sprouted that had never seen light, mingled with pallid fungal growths that seemed to shift and bulge with the bending of the torchlight.

  The inner Doors at the end of the passage stood open. Vines flowed out of the utter dark beyond like a filthy flood frozen in mid-spate, knee-deep or higher, silent, blanched, dead.

  "It's impossible," whispered Vair. "What plants grow without light of the sun?"

  "The Keep was reared by wizards, Lord," said Hethya, her voice the voice of Oale Niu. Vair shot her a sidelong look, suspicious and shaken, his hand straying to the topaz demon-scare he wore. "Else why are we here?"

  Beside him, the Icefalcon heard old Nargois whisper, "Why indeed?"

  "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, arrowsmiss, 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.