05 Icefalcons Quest d-5

by Barbara Hambly

  She sighed, all fight gone, and turned her face. She still wore the clone's overcoat and wrappings and would easily have passed for one of Vair's warriors in the dark. Her mouth tightened hard, not to give anything of herself away, but Loses His Way saw, and the anger went out of his face.

  "There," he said gently, and stepped to her, putting a comforting arm like a bear's great forepaw around her shoulders. "There, Little Ancestor, there's no need to weep."

  She shook her head violently. "It's tired I am, that's all," she said, tears creeping down her cheeks.

  "I know."

  "I just... I did try."

  The broken, toothless mouth moved into what had once been a smile. "I know. And you did well. As well as any warrior."

  "I'm sorry, sweeting." She looked down at Tir, defeated. "You've met His Nastiness. It was join with him or... well, have happen to me what I'd rather not have happen."

  "It's all right." Tir's voice was tiny in the gloom. "I knew you made it up." He stepped close to her on her other side, put his arm around her waist as he did with his mother, and leaned his head against her hip.

  "Way back at Bison Knoll I knew."

  Hethya laughed a little, wept a little, returned the pressure of his embrace, and with her other hand patted the big, knotted hand of Loses His Way.

  "I did what I could."

  Loses His Way smiled, and even through the blood there was a warmth to it, like the sun's ki in whom the Icefalcon's people did not believe. "We all do what we can, Little Ancestor. You kept the boy alive.

  No small thing in dealing with that carrion eater from the South. You did well."

  Tir went on, "And I don't know if... if Bektis will be able to see us, even if we leave this room, or if they'll be able to find us even if he does see us. The old man might not let him."

  "What old man, sweeting?"

  The Icefalcon had come close and had tried already, vainly, to enter the body lying cold and still in its nest of furs. Pain throbbed and cramped him, worse and growing worse still, agonizing, nauseating, flesh shredded, teeth marks showing on the exposed bones.

  Was this why he couldn't return to his own flesh?

  Had he destroyed his ability to do so when he'd taken on the form-for seconds only-of Prinyippos in order to command the clone? Or had he simply been away from his body too long?

  You think you can escape? the old man had screamed after him with peals of mocking laughter.

  And the voice of the clone shouting dumb echoes of voices in his head: I will eat you all.

  Despair closed over him, the knowledge that he would die here in the darkness. The knowledge that it was over.

  "The old man in the Keep," whispered Tir, and his words brought the Icefalcon back to awareness of his surroundings, of these three people beside him, with whom his life was entwined. "The old man with the tattoos all over his hands and the big long fingernails..." Tir's little pink fingers described the obscene curves of the overgrown claws, and the Icefalcon thought, He's seen him, too.

  "He lives in the Keep."

  "You mean a ghost?" asked Loses His Way doubtfully. Besides being a White Raider, his swollen, bloodied face was something from a nightmare, but Tir seemed to have taken his horrible appearance in stride. Loses His Way and Tir drew Hethya back to the little fire, and the chieftain selected a couple more fragments of wood to feed the blaze.

  The boy shook his head. "He's alive," he said. "That's what the whole thing was about. He's been alive..."

  He broke off, groping for words, struggling to make them understand, to understand himself.

  Loses His Way and Hethya traded a look of incomprehension, then looked back at the child. "You mean he was living here before we burrowed through the ice?" Hethya asked gently. "How did he get here, sweeting? What did he eat? Not those filthy plants, to be sure."

  "I can't." Tir buried his face in his arms. "I can't say."

  She stroked his black hair. "There, there, it's all right," she murmured. "You don't have to say."

  She looked up at Loses His Way again. "Your lanky pal's a sort of ghost, though he says he's alive, too.

  He comes to us in dreams."

  "Shadow-walking," agreed Loses His Way, nodding.

  "Here," Hethya said, and looked around her suddenly. "What am I thinking?" She pulled a rag from her pocket; wet it from her water bottle. "Let me at least clean you up and make a civilized man of you."

  The chieftain grinned a little as she daubed water on the rag and very gently began to wash the cuts on his face, and he said, "Ah, never will you make a civilized man of me, Little Ancestor."

  "Civilized man-now there's a contradiction in terms."

  And both laughed a little, the sparkle of their eyes meeting on the outer edge of pain and death and dark.

  "Now, I may not be some reborn mage of the Times Before," she said when she had finished, "but me mother taught me a bit of meditation. It always pays, she said, to know how to calm your mind. Lord knows I'm not going to sleep in any hurry, but meditation may serve for him to speak to us at least."

  Loses His Way nodded. "Our shamans do the same if a shadow-walker becomes lost. It is not something my people do often, you understand,-shadow-walk, that is-for it is very dangerous." He nodded down at the Icefalcon's body. "As we see."

  "He'll be all right," whispered Tir anxiously, "won't he?"

  Hethya's glance crossed the warchief's; it was Loses His Way who replied. "That we do not know, Little King. It may be that he will not. But if anyone can return after this long, it is the Icefalcon."

  He grinned with his broken teeth and puffed lips, blackened blue eyes dancing in the flittering light. "He would not have it said of him that he permitted even death to get the better of him, so of course he must return."

  Tir giggled.

  And what is wrong, demanded the Icefalcon, with striving to be perfect in survival? For there are times when only the perfect survive.

  But he was glad that Tir had lost some of his look of fear.

  "It would help if we had smoke," said Loses His Way, "or some of those herbs that the Wise Ones burn to dissociate the mind from the flesh."

  "You're telling me, laddy-o." Hethya sighed, and closed her eyes. "You're telling me."

  "The Wise Ones taught me this..." Loses His Way gravely touched her face and temples, her hands and arms, at the points of relaxation, the nexus of the body's energies. The tension in Hethya's shoulders eased, and some of the grimness left her face.

  "What is it?" whispered Loses His Way, seeing Tir flinch.

  "That's where they put the needles in," the boy replied in a strained undervoice. "When they make the tethyn."

  "They are the map of the body, the sources of its energies. Anything can be used for evil as well as good, Little King."

  In the corridors far off the chime spoke, and once the Icefalcon heard the rustle of hide-shod feet, two or three turnings away, and a mutter of scared voices. But they faded-evidently the ventilation in this chamber was good enough that the smell of the smoke did not carry-and the dense silence returned, thicker, it seemed, than before.

  Hethya never dropped into sleep. The Icefalcon sensed her mind always working, dragged away to one course or another despite the discipline-which, he guessed, she had never practiced as the Wise Ones practiced it.

  In the corridor the vines rustled, a sighing of movement, though there was no wind.

  You think you can escape?

  "What was that?" Hethya's eyes popped open.

  Tir whispered, "The old man."

  Loses His Way made a move toward the fire.

  "Don't be an ass," breathed Hethya, her hand on his wrist. "He'll see in the dark."

  The warchief was on his feet already, drew his sword, stepped to the doorway, a bearlike bulk in the gloom.

  "Out the back," said Hethya. "We can..."

  "We can't leave the Icefalcon." Tir was on his feet, too, trembling like a leaf in a winter storm.

  "Fo
r pity's sake, laddie... "

  "He's a Guard," said Tir. "I'm his lord. I can't."

  Hethya made a move back toward him. "Too late," murmured Loses His Way, firelight tracing the blade's edge as it lifted to strike. "Can you see him? White hair, like a ghost in midnight."

  Silence flowed out of the dark of the corridor, a long thinking silence, palpable as the ever-thickening cold. Far off a demon bobbed, backlighting the spiderweb of white hair, the dark shape cloaked in magic. Somewhere a voice whispered, thin and envenomed with rotting hate.

  There was another rustle, sharp as the hiss of a snake.

  Then two soft swift steps, a dark bulk emerging from darkness... A muffled curse, and Ingold Inglorion threw himself through the door, white hair disheveled and drawn sword flickering with pale light.

  He rolled under Loses His Way's strike and turned, panting, to stand for a moment in the doorway, facing out into the haunted abyss.

  For a moment it seemed that the shadows reached out to him, surrounded him, smothering and evil...

  Then it seemed that something altered, shifted, and there was only darkness again.

  "Dratted plants." Ingold turned; his voice was like flawed bronze, brown velvet, and rust, unmistakable.

  "To think I once liked salad. Miss Hethya-or should I say Lady Oale Niu-I do hope you have something with which to make tea."

  Chapter 18

  "It was you that I saw." The Icefalcon pulled the thick mammoth-wool coat closer and experimentally flexed his hands. Though this part of the Keep wasn't noticeably cold, he could not stop shivering. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again. "In the chamber with the crystal pillars-last night? The night before?"

  In the dark of this place it was difficult enough to keep track of time, even without the nightmare of suffocation, cold, demons, and terror. An echo of pain remained, a phantom imprint burned in his mind.

  Every few minutes he would feel his own arms again, not trusting himself to believe that there was flesh over the bone.

  "That was me." Ingold dug into one of the packets of food he'd brought in his knapsack, which he and Loses His Way had retrieved from the corridor while the Icefalcon, numb, dizzy, and feeling like a piece of very old driftwood on a beach, lay staring at the ocher firelight patterns on the ceiling, blinking now and then and rejoicing obscurely in the friction of a real eyelid over a real eye. "Have a cake."

  The old man extended a potato cake to him. The Icefalcon devoured it ravenously and immediately felt queasy at the revival of digestive organs. He wasn't about to say so, however. He was the Icefalcon-and food was food.

  "You might have informed me," said the Icefalcon, "that you'd followed us after all. Your presence would have been useful in any number of instances."

  "I'm very sure it would have been," Ingold replied soothingly.

  "I take it your interesting little accounts of the Siege of Renweth were fabricated from reports sent to you by Ilae and Wend?"

  "By no means." The wizard look a bite of dried apricot-apricots grew well in the Keep's crypts, along with grapes, cherries, and several varieties of nuts. Other than the usual cuts and scratches gained from cross-country travel and sleeping rough, and a bandage around one hand that the Icefalcon remembered from his vision in the pillared chamber, Ingold did not seem much the worse for wear: shabby and unprepossessing as an old boot and several times tougher.

  "Four days ago-which was the last time your sister spoke to me-I was in the Vale of Renweth, readying the latest of my half-dozen attempts to draw off General Gargonal's troops long enough to let me slip through the Doors. That one succeeded, I'm pleased to say-it's quite surprising what men will believe if you take them off guard in the middle of the afternoon. When you saw me, I was in one of the laundry rooms in the Royal Sector, specifically, the chamber Brycothis designated, or seemed to designate, as the Renweth end of what Gil refers to as a transporter."

  "Surely you knew it had to be something of the kind," he added, seeing the Icefalcon's expression of startled enlightenment. Gil had told a number of tales that involved transporters.

  "Vair na-Chandros is many things, but he isn't a fool. Of course the only reason he would take such a troublesome journey would be if he thought there was a way from here straight into Dare's Keep. Even with the Hand of Harilomne, Bektis couldn't have overpowered Ilae, Rudy, and Wend together, and the wards on the Arrow River Road were strong enough to have warned us of the army's approach in spite of all Bektis might do."

  Ingold extended his hands gratefully to the fire. "I guessed as soon as Wend told me Tir had been kidnapped that it had to be something of the sort, and Cold Death's information only confirmed my suspicions. Vair sought such a thing at Prandhays first, didn't he, Hethya?"

  "I don't know what he was after seeking at Prandhays." Hethya, still sitting in the circle of Loses His Way's arm, raised her chin from her fists. She had been staring dully at and past the cell's obsidian wall, as if defeated or expecting punishment; there was a questioning look as she met the wizard's bright-blue gaze.

  Whatever she saw in Ingold's eyes must have encouraged her, for she sat up a little straighter and said,

  "That Bektis, he went through every stick and stitch of Mother's scrolls-dragged 'em all down and spent all the winter at 'em, the ones she'd never known the tongues of-while Vair and Bektis hauled me out of me cell every couple of days and asked me this and that, and me never knowin' what it was they wanted to hear or what they'd do to me if they didn't get it."

  Her nostrils flared, and she fell silent again, the twist in her lips a line of ugly memories.

  "Now you speak of it, they did ask me about travel between Keeps-they asked Oale Niu, that is-and I kept sayin' there wasn't much, there wasn't much. Stands to reason, you see."

  She shrugged and took another bite from the dried fruit that ingold had passed all around. "You'd never want to get farther than you could find shelter at sunset. I would have said, 'None at all,' but Mother did find some pretty old scrolls of what she said looked like copies of copies of things from far, far back, talkin' of travel, so there must have been some. You'd never have got me out."

  Her eyebrows, coppery in the glinting amber light, pulled together. "Two accounts, they was, and both of 'em full of fightin' off the Dark with torches and wizards puttin' up flares all round the camps, and such, though we had no way of knowin' how far after the coming of the Dark those were written, nor who'd been at 'em and changed 'em around since. People do, you know," she added. "Mum found two or three times, where she'd have a tale written one way, and then another one fifty or so years later, where somebody'd changed it."

  "That," the Icefalcon said haughtily, "is because civilized people make up so many stories to amuse themselves that they do not understand truth when they encounter it. Among my people it would not have happened."

  "Among your people all you talk of is animal tracks and the weather, I've heard."

  "Of a certainty." Loses His Way looked wounded by the distaste in her voice. "How else can you know where to hunt, or what the pasturage for your horses will be, or where the game will graze did you not know where the rains have been in the spring? How can you tell which herds travel where unless you know the tracks of their leaders and where they went last spring and the spring before? And besides," he added, "they are friends, those leaders. The herd of Broken Horn, the great rhinoceros of the Ten Muddy Streams Country, I have followed his tracks for fifteen years now. I know where he is likely to lead his people in seasons when the rain comes before the Moon of Blossoms and when it doesn't fall in the Twisted Hills Country until after the New Moon of Fawns."

  "Be that as it may," said Ingold, turning encouragingly to Hethya. He had experience with the peoples of the Real World once they got on the subject of weather and animal tracks.

  "Be that as it may," she said. "I cribbed pretty heavy off those travel stories, and Vair, he never could get around me."

  "And I take it," said Ingold, his
deep, scratchy voice a little dreamy, "that one of those two travel tales concerned this place."

  "Aye," Hethya said softly. "Aye, it did that."

  Far off a man's voice could be heard shouting nonsense words, or perhaps crying out in another tongue.

  Ingold lifted his head, blue eyes wary under eyelids marked with tiny, hooked, vicious scars; listening.

  Sorting sound from sound, as mages did, sorting the darkness with his mind.

  The Icefalcon thought of those endless hallways stretching away into shadow, the chambers glimpsed in confusing dreams, rustling with lubberly vegetation that crept with demons, into which men bored stubbornly, stupidly, working their way inward, not out.

  I will eat them all.

  His memory had curious gaps in it, but some images were branded into his consciousness: an old man gripping a struggling demon between his hands, grinning as he tore chunks of its glowing, plasmic pseudoflesh with his misshapen teeth and drank of its life.

  The Keep was coming to life.

  There was something he was forgetting. Something he'd heard. Bektis cradling blood and jewels to his breast. Prinyippos preening himself. Vair...

  You think you can escape?

  "I couldn't say I'd been one of them as had left this place, see," Hethya went on after a moment, "because I didn't know how long after the coming of the Dark that was. And I didn't know what Bektis knew. But Bektis already knew that this place had been left, for whatever reason: left standin' empty, he said, and the people all just walked out and shut the doors behind 'em. God knows why."

  "I can guess," said Ingold. "We came very close to it ourselves a few years ago-leaving Renweth, I mean.

  An ice storm killed all the stock and most of the food plants. This far north, with the Ice advancing, it was bound to happen. Or maybe there was sickness."

  The Icefalcon sat up a little, his back propped against the wall, his sword near his hand-he was never completely comfortable unless his sword was near his hand and he had a dagger where he could get to it fast-and accepted another potato cake. In the back of his mind a name tugged at him, a half-forgotten vision of a warrior and a child. "Who was the old man?"