05 Icefalcons Quest d-5

by Barbara Hambly

  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 tore, 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 lie 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."

  Chapter 14

  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.

  "We know why some were made." Hethya's mother flicked with the backs of her fingers at the pile of scrolls on the desk before her: heaps of them, tablets and codexes and books.

  Gil-Shalos, thought the Icefalcon, would perish with envy at the sight. "Most of this is rot, rubbish, but some of it, my girl... Some of it has told me some most interesting things."

  "Such as?" Hethya hoisted the child on her hip and crossed the cell to stand by her mother's chair. For a time the two women studied the scrolls with heads together, the child grasping and reaching for the older woman's hair-sticks, the resemblance clear between the three dissimilar faces.

  In the corners of the cell, and through the archways and half cells and vestibules opening from it, the Icefalcon glimpsed dim half-familiar shapes: the sections of canopy that had been over the iron vat in the wagon, the half-assembled midpart of the Dark Lightning's cradle.

  There was a black stone table in one of the vestibules that the Icefalcon recognized, such a table as Ingold and Gil-Shalos used to read the smoky polyhedrons that held the records of the Times Before.

  If bandits had taken Prandhays Keep, the Icefalcon could guess what had become of that child, what had become of Hethya as well. When the armies of humankind were being raised for an assault on the Dark, Ingold and Alde had both sent to Degedna Marina, landchief of the Felwoods, begging for all and any machinery or relicts of the Times Before, for any mageborn they could find.

  Degedna Marina had dispatched a small force of her warriors-and those of her lesser lords-but denied finding such mechanisms in any of the three Felwoods Keeps. No wizards, she said, dwelled among those who survived.

  Hethya straightened up, began a sort of dance with her child on her hip to make the toddler laugh. She stopped at the sound of a sharp scratching by the cell's curtained door, called out gaily, "I'm coming, Ruvis."

  "Ruvis, is it?" Her mother looked up, exasperated, amused. "Mal Buckthorn just brought you back here an hour ago!"

  "Shh! Ruvis'll hear you!"

  But her mother had kept her voice down, evidently knowing her daughter well. Hethya put the child in a cradle wrought of forest twigs and ancient goldwork, tucked it up with a sheepskin and a bright-patched quilt, and said, "You be me good, little dumplin', till I return, me peach, me blueberry."

  She checked a mirror, readjusting the jeweled comb in her hair. "Dub Waterman's coming by for me around midnight, Mother. If so be he gets here before I get back, tell him I've gone out for a few minutes to fetch you some lampblack from Oggo
Peggit in the Back Warrens and I'll be right back..."

  Her mother rolled her eyes, "You are incorrigible." But she laughed as she said it and kissed her and tousled her hair. And because this was a dream the Icefalcon felt Hethya's sorrow and the pain of her loss and knew the grown Hethya, the woman Hethya, wept in her sleep.

  He stepped away from her, back into the Keep of the End of Time. They lay together in their cell, Hethya and Tir, the child snuggled in the woman's arms.

  The earlier guard had been replaced by a clone, who sat just outside the shut and bolted oak panels, staring indifferently at the dirty torchlight on the opposite wall. Only the thinnest fuzz of hair covered his scalp, but what was unmistakably a patch of wool grew from his cheek.

  Within the cell, an oil lamp burned, a grimy fleck of fire in the close-crowding shadows. Tir, too, dreamed of a Keep.

  Not Dare's Keep, not the Keep the mage Brycothis had surrendered her human life to enter as Heart-Mage and core.

  The Icefalcon recognized the Keep of the Shadow, though the vast Aisle was cleared to its rear wall and the light of glowstones outlined from within a patchwork of balconies, open archways, winding staircase, and a rose window like the lost sun of summer.

  The streams on the black stone floor spoke with gentle music; the voices of the men who walked there echoed very softly, like single pebbles dropped into still ponds.

  Tir was there. Sometimes he looked like Tir-Tir worn to his bones, sunken eyes desperate in a scarred face-and sometimes he looked like someone else, a sturdy boy just coming into adolescence, with the dark-gray eyes of the House of Dare and black hair growing unevenly out of what had been a close crop. He walked in the wake of two men and looked about him as he walked.

  One was a burly middle-aged warrior whose initial pug-faced ugliness had been recently augmented by scars and burns. The Icefalcon recognized the wounds.

  He carried such marks on his chest, right arm, and hand from the acid and fire of the Dark Ones. Most adults in the Keep did. The other man was small and fine-boned, his shaved skull illuminated with the intricate tattooing that Gil-Shalos said was the mark of a mage in the Times Before.

  "I know you weren't ready for this," said the scar-faced warrior. "But with Fyanach's death I don't think we have a choice."

  "No," the mage said in a voice that could have been contained in the smallest of pottery jars. "No. And I understood there was the possibility when I assented to come."

  But there was stricken pain in his eyes. He was fair-skinned and, like his friend's, his face and scalp and tattoo-written hands were crossed with burn scars and the pink, brittle flesh of acid scalds, the track of battle against the Dark Ones. "Will they ever know?" he asked.

  "Some will." They weren't speaking in the Wathe, or the ha'al, or any tongue the Icefalcon had ever heard. He knew his understanding of it came only through Tir, who remembered in his dream. "It's not a knowledge many share, even at Raendwedth."

  The name meant Eye of the Heart-the capacity to read a person or situation clearly-coupled with the locative for mountains; the Icefalcon hadn't known that was the derivation of Renweth Vale's name.

  "There have been too many corrupt wizards, too much evil magic. Too many hate magic on principle now, and small blame to them. So it's not a knowledge that can be shared. But some will always know, down through the years. Your name-and what you do-will not be forgotten. That I promise you, Zay, my friend."

  "I do not... want to be forgotten." Zay rubbed his chest, half unconsciously, as if to massage away some cold or grief. "And Le-Ciabbeth?"

  "I'll tell her."

  The great clock spoke, hard leaden chimes that flattened on the air.

  "She'll want to come here," said the scar-faced man after a time. "I'll detail warriors to escort her, as soon as they can be spared."

  "No." Zay stopped and caught his companion's arm, desperation in his face. "Too long."

  He led the ugly man across a succession of footbridges, down the vast plain of the floor, through a silence that diminished their footfalls to a thrush peck against rock, then up the double stair way that curved to a pillared door at the Aisle's inner end. In the Keep of Renweth the territory at the end of the Aisle on the first level belonged to the Church and that above to the Lady of the Keep.

  The two men stopped again at the top of the stair, on the threshold of a triple archway. "You'd best go back, son," said the warrior; speaking to Tir. "In time you'll know this secret, but now is not the time."

  "But something might happen to you, Father." Tir spoke in the cracking voice of adolescence, and indeed as he spoke he wore the form of that other boy, in his black kilt all stamped with stylized eagles of gold.

  "Isn't that why you brought me? So I'd know, in case the Dark...?"

  "It is the Dark we fear here, son. The Dark, and what they might conceivably learn." The father stepped away from his friend to put a hand on the son's shoulder. "After I've spoken with the other mages at Raendwedth, we'll see."

  But the Icefalcon felt Tir's memory-the memory of stories he'd heard about his own father, his real father, Eldor Andarion, seized and borne away by the Dark Ones to their hellish nests-and after the two men vanished through the right-hand archway, the boy crept stealthily in their wake.

  The northern end of the Keep beyond the Aisle was the headquarters of the Keep's ruling landchief, containing the chambers where his warriors slept and the rooms where his weavers, potters, smiths, and bakers dwelled with their families and plied their trades.

  Here-as in Renweth-there were audience chambers great and small, conference halls, even chambers spelled with Runes of Silence against the working of wizardry, which could hold the mageborn prisoners within their walls. There had always, the Icefalcon deduced, been renegade shamans.

  But unlike Renweth, this Keep was new. In Renweth over the countless years, families and clans had broken walls, enlarged cells, put in new stairways to suit their convenience-diverted the water pipes and run conduits off public fountains and latrines, installed false ceilings to create storage lofts, knocked out new doors or blocked old ones up: in general behaved like people making themselves thoroughly at home.

  In the Keep of Dreams, corridors still ran straight and wide. Doorways were uniform and uniformly equipped with wooden louvers-(I'll have to tell Gil-Shalos all this)-and no pipes ran along the high black ceilings or the walls along the floor.

  No bindweed tangle of ramose chaos; no torches.

  Only glowstones in mesh baskets casting pale clear shadows as mage and warrior entered a cell (fourth on the right after the pillared audience chamber), mounted the spiral stair there, and, in the small conference chamber above, worked a catch behind a sconce on the wall to open a hidden panel.

  They ascended a farther stair, and the boy who was also Tir watched them from below. He was tall enough-barely-to reach and work the lever behind the sconce. The stair was narrow, concealed within a wall, the Icefalcon guessed. He wondered if there were a corresponding route in Renweth and what its goal might be.

  Here the goal was disappointing: a round vestibule entered, and exited again, by two doors that were only the width of a man's shoulders and barely six feet tall. What seemed to be a long conference hall lay beyond, though there was no table there, no chairs. Its eastern wall contained an archway flanked with frost-white pilasters in whose core seemed to be a half-seen spiral of broken fragments of iron and rock.

  The archway led through a smaller chamber, likewise bare and likewise giving by a similarly pilastered arch into a third still smaller, and so into a fourth. Fearful of being seen, the boy remained hidden in the gloom of the vestibule, watching his father and the wizard Zay slowly pace the length of the first hall, then pass between the pillars to the second. Their voices were too low to be heard, but he saw Zay gesture, desperate, demanding, his shadow swooping huge over the wall, though what he demanded the boy did not know.

  Around them the Keep slept, secure against the Dark Ones that haunt
ed the lands outside. Tir turned away, afraid to follow further, and descended the secret stair.

  The Icefalcon waited for him at the bottom.

  "Icefalcon!" The boy flung himself at him, sobbing with relief, grabbed him hard around the waist, and pressed his wounded face to his belt knot, clinging as if he'd never let go. "Icefalcon, get me out of here!

  Get me out of here! They killed Rudy, and Mama's dead, and they're going to break into the Keep and kill everyone because Vair thinks there's more weapons in the Keep, and he needs a place to raise an army that has food and can't be broken into like Prandhays..."

  "Easy." The Icefalcon awkwardly stroked at the boy's dark hair. "Easy." He had always abhorred weeping children and was uneasily aware that such overwhelming emotion could decant the boy into wakefulness again. It might be hours then before he slept, and the Icefalcon had information to impart, and the cold pain, the ache of concentration, was beginning to saw at his consciousness.

  "Your mother's not dead. Nor is Rudy, though he was badly hurt."

  Tir lifted a face wild with hunger and the fear of belief. The Icefalcon felt a cold lance of fury at the man who would put that look into a child's eyes. "Lord Vair said..."

  "Lord Vair's a liar."

  Tir pressed his face to the Icefalcon's side and again burst into tears.

  "Tir, listen. Listen." We don't have time for this. The Icefalcon patted the brittle little shoulder blades and wished Hethya were there.

  And why didn't she wake Tir if he was sobbing in his sleep? Stupid wench, probably deep in some dream of tupping Ruvis or Mal or Dub or Dare of Renweth or Sergeant Red Boots or the Alketch Cavalry Corps...

  "Tir, listen to me." The storm seemed to be subsiding. "I'm here to get you out, but you must help me.

  Can you do that?"

  Tir looked up at him again, wiped his eyes, and nodded.

  "Good boy. I'm separated from my body now-my people call it shadow-walking-but I think I can get you out of this cell. I'm going to leave you now and scout a place outside the Keep where you can hide, a place for me to meet you and a route to get there. Then I'll return, tell you where to go, and get the guard to let you out."