"No," whispered Tir. "No, Icefalcon, please. Vair..." He stammered a little, as if his throat closed in protest against even forming the name.
He swallowed, mopped his cheeks, and made himself go on. "Vair will make me tell. About the stairway.
About the rooms. That's what he's here for. That's what he wants."
"What lies there?" The Icefalcon's pale brows knit. He thought he'd had a clear view to the back of the succession of chambers and had seen nothing.
Tir shook his head violently. "He'll make me tell," he whispered. "Bektis will make me tell. There's a spell they can do... Icefalcon, please."
The boy began to tremble and hiccup, and the Icefalcon patted his shoulders again. "Sh-sh. Very well."
He was thinking fast-and in truth, until he knew what Vair intended he did not know how much time he'd have. "How well do you know this Keep? Is there a place on the first level where you can hide? Close enough to the doors that you can get there quickly?"
Tir nodded. "There's places Bektis can't find me. Places magic doesn't work. Up there"-he pointed up the concealed stairway-"is one of them, but it's all grown up with plants in real life."
"Can you find another such? Good. When I leave you, you must wake and slip away as soon as the guard opens the door. Go quietly, so not to rouse Hethya."
"Can Hethya come with me? Icefalcon, please!" he added, feeling the warrior stiffen, and grabbed a handful of wolfskin vest as if he feared the Icefalcon would thrust him away.
"She's sorry, and she hates Vair as much as I do, and she only helped him because she was afraid not to. He'll hurt her real bad if I run away and she doesn't. Please."
"And if she decides it's in her best interests that neither of you flee?" He still remembered her in the high Vale, soaked with the clone's blood and clutching her hair in false terror. Remembered her gazing down at the Keep and declaiming in the voice of Oale Niu.
"She won't. Please." His eyes filled, and he blinked hard to keep them from running over: not a child's bid for pity, but fear for the sake of one who had been his only comfort. "She helped me, Icefalcon. I can't leave her."
He sighed. This was getting more and more complicated. "Let me speak to the wench."
She was dreaming about Ruvis. Or Mal or Dub or goodness knew who else-someone with long blond hair and muscular buttocks. The Icefalcon poked Hethya in the shoulder with his toe. She wriggled out from under and sat up, startled and protesting, hay in her rumpled hair: they were in a barn loft, sometime before the rising of the Dark.
Wide windows opened to night and summer hay, and in the moment before Hethya's face and body assumed their present-day appearance she seemed no more than a girl of seventeen.
And beautiful. thought the Icefalcon. Gay and wild as a pony in springtime.
"You?" she said, clearly discomposed. She frowned. "You're the one..."
"Who rescued you in the Vale at the last quarter moon, the more fool I."
She scratched hay and flowers out of her hair and pulled up her bodice to cover a sailor's paradise of breast. Her handsome lover folded away into a trick of the moonlight.
"I can get you out of the cell," the Icefalcon said shortly. "Will you go? Tir can lead you to a hiding place while I find a route to get you to hiding outside the Keep the next time they open the Doors. Tir seems to trust you."
The lush mouth tightened down hard, and she looked aside. "Poor infant. Poor little child."
"Poor child indeed if he's got only you to guard him," retorted the Icefalcon, and she looked back at him in a flash of anger. "Or would you rather continue Vair's doxy?"
She struck at him, mouth square with anger and teeth bared, and he caught her wrist and twisted her out of his way.
She pulled free, rubbing her wrist-in the dream they both had physical form or a very strong illusion of it-banked rage like the dying fires of a burned house in her eyes.
"And what choice have I, me lanky boy? To be killed by his troops the way they killed half the other women at Prandhays, after they'd raped the lot of us six ways from the backside of next week? To be made a slave to them or sold to some bandit troop for enough mules and sheep to mount the siege at Renweth and bring His Foulness this far?"
The Icefalcon asked quietly, "is that what happened to your mother?"
"You leave me mother out of this, boy-o." She looked away, breathing hard, her face half veiled in the tangle of her hair.
"Me mother died the summer before last," she said finally. "Or that time of the year that should have been a summer, with the wheat rotten in the stem and us killin' the very cats for meat. There was fey wicked things in the woods then that killed some in the Keep-two of the little children and one of the herdboys that was Mother's pupil in spite of all his parents had to say about witches and souls. They killed Mother, too, I think-the things in the woods."
She brought up her hand, chewing her thumbnail, red mouth pulled down, ugly and hard.
"When old Vair and his stinking lot came marching up the road, there wasn't a great deal to be done nor any to say 'em nay. Her La'ship had made the Keep strong against the Dark Ones, but it'd been broken far back in the days, repaired strong, and broken again. Mother'd found the signs of it all around the walls, she said. It was nothing to Bektis and his putrid crystal Hand."
She sighed, looking down while she jerked the laces of her bodice tight. The Icefalcon propped a foot against a winnowing fork and rested his right hand on his sword-hilt. Even as a disembodied spirit within a dream he did not discount the possibility of attack.
"Mother always said the more we knew of the Keep-the more anybody knew of anything-the better everyone's chances would be. She'd always studied everything she could lay hand to. When she found all them papers and scrolls and tablets of gold and glass buried in the vaults of the Keep, she wouldn't rest till she'd read every one. She was like that. I don't know if you'd understand."
"I understand." The Icefalcon saw again Gil-Shalos' formidable collection and ink-stained, bandaged fingers.
"Well, there was a deal of apparatus in the Keep," Hethya went on. "Things Degendna Marina didn't tell the Lady Minalde about, and we kept finding more. Men would hunt for it in the vaults and in these sort of tombs in the hills north of Prandhays.
"Somebody found if you buried bits of it under your fields the insects wouldn't eat the corn-at least that's what they claimed. Or that it would draw deer into traps, or put under a mattress would let a man be seven times a hero in bed, though that was wishful thinking so far as I could ever tell.
"Still, those who found the stuff, for all me mother's pleading and her La'ship's orders, they'd break it up and sell the bits to any who'd aught to trade for it: a bit of land that bordered the spring or a cell closer to the fountains or the latrines, or maybe just a fine iron pot. I bought back pieces of it for her, whenever I could. I told her I traded sewing for it." Her eyes met his, steadily, jeeringly, daring him to speak.
He only said, "Ah."
"Well." She let out her breath. "And for nothing, in the end of it all. Mother had parchments, drawings of these things, and how some of them worked, all written out as far as she could figure 'em, though they could only be worked by wizards. She said a lot of the instructions weren't clear even at that, or had gone missing over the years." She waded through the hay to the loft windows, jade moonlight and oceanic dark.
"Like it?"
The Icefalcon followed politely. Stubble meadows and neat orchards lay half guessed behind hurdles of withe, fruit gleaming faintly among inky leaves. Sheep grazed the stubble. Somewhere someone played a mandolin; a drum tapped dance rhythms.
He thought, The heart of mud-digger laziness. But there was pride in her voice.
"Father loved this farm, put his heart and his sweat and his soul in it. He kept asking me when I'd decide which beau to wed so he could train him up in its management, the way he tried to train me. Poor Dad."
She shook her head. "I was too much Mother's daughter to be a
yeoman farmer, but I hadn't her power.
Even all her reading, I just followed what I chose of it, for the fun of the thing. I never knew all those lists of True Names she was after memorizing, nor could tell a sassafras from a dogwood. But when Vair and his boys showed up and started lookin' about for anyone they could sell, I rolled up my eyes and went into a fit and gave it all to 'em about Oale Niu. She was originally a princess I'd made up stories about, I and me girlfriend Lotis, when we were little-later on I told 'em to me daughter. Lotis was dead by the time Vair came."
She looked back over her round white shoulder at him, watching his reaction from under thick lashes.
Below them her father's land lay still and sweet, like the Night River Country before the coming of the ice.
Should someone enter his dreams, he wondered, would they walk through the flowering reed beds along the Night River or see otters there playing in the birch-fringed pools?
"Is that what you were after learning, me bonny iceberg? Who this slut is that lets Vair tell her what to do?"
"No," the Icefalcon said, more quietly than he had spoken at first. "What I want to know is, will you hide with Tir in the Keep until I can get you both out? Look after the boy? Not hand him over to Vair to save your own skin?"
Hethya sighed and pressed her forehead to the wood of the window frame. "'Tis madness." She sounded weary unto death. "He'll find us in time. He needs the child. Whatever it is the boy knows he won't be letting him go."
"The Keep is large," said the Icefalcon. "Tir knows it. You don't happen to know what it is that Vair is so eager to learn?"
Her head moved again, No. "I'm not so sure the child himself knows, poor little lamb, for all that Bektis was after telling our stinkissimo about the memories of the House of Dare. If their memories were so bloody exact, why didn't old Eldor remember how they'd put the Dark Ones to rout, instead of lettin' a thousand men die that could have stayed in Prandhays and kept the bandits away? Liars," she whispered, shutting her eyes in despair. "All of 'em, liars."
Sadness crept into the darkness, the hopeless grief that colored her dream. Far off, as if on the other side of the trees, he saw the reflected glow of flames in the sky and heard the shouting of warriors looting, the screams of women.
"Will you go with Tir?" he pressed her. "Help him to hide? Not give him over to Vair? You know once Vair's forced what he wants of Tir, you'll just be handed over to the troops again."
He felt the flash of her hatred for him, for speaking of it, but he only spoke truth and she knew it. At length she let her breath out in a sigh and said, "Aye. Aye, friend ghost, you open that door for us and I'll do it. How much worse can matters get?"
The Icefalcon forbore to enlighten her on that head and said only, "Good. Wake now, and wake the boy.
By the next time you sleep I'll have scouted a way through the warriors outside."
The Icefalcon's one fear, as he stepped through the desiccated wood of the door, was that the clone had succumbed to possession of demons or that he had been joined by another man.
There were demons in the corridor, tiny floating lights that sometimes had the appearance of eyes, and a cold and sluggish elemental of some kind, hissing and whispering in a circle around the warrior and reaching out to pinch his toes.
He was one-the Icefalcon remembered-of a clone group of thirteen, and by the dull glaze of the man's eyes the Icefalcon guessed he wasn't far from a state of permanent dream. In anycase it shouldn't be difficult to step into the dreaming halls of that vacant awareness.
Nor was it. At the last instant before going in the Icefalcon smelled what was in there, but it was too late to stop: he should have realized, he thought, that having no mind to speak of, the clone would recall its only memory.
Pain. Over, and over, and over.
As when the demons ripped his flesh, it did little good for the Icefalcon to tell himself that this was illusion, and somebody else's illusion at that. The pain drowned him, a vat of fire and worse than fire: blinding, specific, agonizing.
The pain of the skin bursting at every needle's entry point and peeling slowly back. The pain of every sinus and cavity of the skull bloating up with blood until the membranes burst. The pain of every nerve-fiber outlining itself in scalding heat, searing into a pain-ghost strong enough to reduplicate its image down to the smallest screaming shred of oozing flesh...
Not real. Not real. Not real.
Disorientation, horror, cold, and the laughter of demons who'd seen it coming.
Mind, consciousness, concentration crumpling under the blinding assault, the Icefalcon could only speak to the hazy fragments of consciousness that remained in the clone:
"Unbolt the door behind you, then walk to that first corridor and go down it until you reach a wall." He could barely get the words out and then dropped out of the man's dreaming, to lie sobbing on the black stone floor while all around him the demons shrieked and bit each other with laughter and the sodden elemental rolled over onto him to see if there was anything of him it could absorb.
Oh, get off me, you stupid wad of slime. The Icefalcon slid wearily aside. And the pack of you have my permission to sodomize one another repeatedly with splintery sticks.
Howling with mirth, the demons manifested the ghostly echoes of splintery sticks. The Icefalcon looked away, repelled.
He couldn't imagine any being sufficiently stupid as to obey his bald and desperate instruction, but then, Gil frequently told him he had no imagination.
Very much to his surprise, the clone got to his feet, slid back the door bolt, and ambled through the daisy chain of demons and down the corridor, to vanish around the first available corner.
The Icefalcon started to repeat Rudy Solis' favorite expression of astonishment- Well, III be buggered-looked at the demons, and said instead, "My goodness me."
As he got to his feet the door opened.
Hethya looked scared, but, curiously enough, considering all he'd been through, Tir only wore an expression of quiet alertness, with a trace of the inward look he got when he went fishing through the ancient darkness of other people's memories.
He whispered, "This way." Hethya paused long enough to check the lamp-which she had almost covered with its pierced lid-and latch the door again before she followed.
Demons frisking around him, the Icefalcon made his way down the hall to where the clone stood, facing the blank black inner wall of the Keep.
It will hurt. I will let the pain pass through me and give it to the Watchers behind the Stars, who eat pain.
He stepped into the man's dreaming again, fast, and said, "Turn around, go back up this corridor and to the latched door again. Sit down outside it as you were."
He still lay on the floor, groggy with shock, trying hard to keep his spirit from dissipating until the pain's echoes lessened, when the clone and its attendant pack of demons rounded the corner.
So much, he thought, for that.
It took him a little time, pacing the Keep's straight black corridors, to find Tir and Hethya. Even as a shadow-walking dream, he moved as he had in his waking body, though he could stride faster than they because of his height.
The Keep might be intact, but it was a crazy-house nevertheless, clogged with foliage, corridors and stairs blocked entirely by lichen and molds, by mushrooms colorless as dead men's flesh and the size of newborn lambs. In some rooms light shone, curious and sickly and from no apparent source, and these rooms were choked thick with growths that then spread through corridors.
In others-and not necessarily those near the outer wall of the Keep-there was no heat at all and frost coated the walls three and four inches thick, the ceilings turned to wildernesses of icicles and the floors to knee-deep mountains of cauliflower ice.
Tir and Hethya had to turn back repeatedly, either because the corridors were clogged or because they could afford to leave no track, either in frost or leaves.
"The Icefalcon said-in my dream he said-Rudy and Mama were still ali
ve." Tir's voice was tiny, a despairing whisper of hope as they stole through the square-cornered warrens. "He said Vair was just lying. Do you think that was true? Don't step there," he added, pulling Hethya back from a stretch where ice sparkled in a sugary shroud. "We have to go around again."
"Me blueberry, I don't know." Hethya squeezed his too thin shoulder. Her breath was smoke in the firefly glow of their lamp.
"Vair's a born liar sure enough, but a born liar can still tell the truth, and Bektis hit your friend with enough levin-fire to stop a megathere in its tracks, and that's a fact. Sometimes it's best just to put it from your mind, sweetheart, and not tell yourself yes or no. Your ma may still be alive, and him just sayin' she's dead so you won't try to get away back to her, but it's a bad world, and bad things happen. Can you put it aside, tuck it up in a little box in your heart, till it's time to find out?"
Tir swallowed. "I can try."
The Icefalcon followed them until Tir, after long trial and error marked by two more dim chimes of the endless clock, found the cell he sought, a double in the far front corner of the second level, marked with Runes of Silence and reached by an inconspicuous stair whose entry was hidden by one of those tricks of shadow and perspective so dear to the mages of the Times Before.
There he left them and started back the short way for the Doors, having no fear of leaving his footprints in the frost. Being only shadow himself he saw clearly in darkness, but it seemed to him, descending the hidden stair and striding quickly along the straight silent passageways, that the darkness lay somehow thicker than it had, thicker than it should.
He paused, tingling in all his nerves. Far off, at the end of the corridor, something moved: three violet lights, not the marshfire flicker of demons, but something else. Then darkness again, and a moment later, soft and thready, a breath of a whistled tune.
The cold that had tortured him since the shedding of his flesh redoubled, curling around the shadows of his bones and clutching tight. Not fear, he told himself, but reasonable caution made him back away and seek another route downward to the Aisle and the Doors.
05 Icefalcons Quest d-5 Page 23
