05 Icefalcons Quest d-5

by Barbara Hambly

  "Someone passed here since you and I departed to meet Loses His Way near the Aisle. But whether that someone was child or grown, woman or man, coming first and then going away or emerging from the room and fleeing, I cannot tell from these few marks in this light."

  "Could someone have found the room?" she asked, moving after the Icefalcon as he proceeded up the hallway, snakelike on his belly, checking and studying each inch of the broken tracks through the vines.

  "Entered it and taken him away?"

  "Indeed someone could," the Icefalcon replied. He spit a stray strand of his hair out of his mouth.

  "Whether they did or not is another matter."

  "There was no sign of struggle." Loses His Way appeared from the nearest crossing corridor, another vine-torch in his hand. The instincts and training of a tracker were deep in his core; it would take more than the horror of cloning, of having his soul and self divided, to rob him of that. "The moss and fungus on the walls is thick. It would take a print easily."

  "Were Tir a man grown I would say it pointed to his leaving of his own accord," agreed the Icefalcon.

  "But a child is easily overcome. Easily fooled as well, though less so, I think, with that particular child."

  "There." He stopped in the crossing of another passageway, rising to his knees and holding the torch aloft. "At last. See how the stems and broken leaves lie, outward into this corridor where the floor is clear? There is no sign of someone coming inward. More, the fanned-out stems and broken leaves aren't much. Small size and slight weight. He departed alone, of his own will, I think."

  "Why?"

  "Thought leaves no track." The Icefalcon crawled a few more feet, examining the floor, which in this portion of the corridor was hard black stone, unyielding of any mark. A little farther on, lichens blotched it and the walls. Tir had gone carefully, but not carefully enough.

  "There. That's his foot." The Icefalcon looked up. "The ceilings are high, but had a man borne that little lamp I think the smoke would have marked the fungus." The thick, whitish growth clumped the ceiling overhead, like the wrinkled bellies of pigs.

  "Demons may have found him there and frightened him into leaving, but he didn't flee in panic. See how the heel of his foot is marked as deep as the toe? He seeks something. Look how he's tried one passageway, then turned back."

  "And you said thought leaves no track?" Hethya scuffed along after him, amused.

  The Icefalcon raised his brows. "There is nothing here of the boys thought. Only what I can guess from his actions. If I saw an antelope's track going toward Cranberry Pond, then turning so suddenly that sand was kicked up toward the pond, I would surmise that the beast smelled a dire wolf in the serviceberry thicket between the two maple trees there."

  He rubbed his eyes, which burned from lack of sleep. His body ached, and the very small amount of pemmican he'd consumed from the last of Loses His Way's stash had ceased to deliver energy a long time ago.

  "And how d'ye know it was a dire wolf and not a saber-tooth or a wee bit of a bobcat, me lanky boy?"

  "Because a family of dire wolves have hunted for twenty years among the serviceberry thickets on that side of Cranberry Pond. And what of Oale Niu?" he continued, resuming his careful quest along the passageway. "What has she to say of where the child might seek safer refuge, here in the Keep of Night?"

  Glancing back at Hethya's silence, he saw the woman duck her head, her rich mouth tightening ruefully in the flickering torchlight. "Oale Niu would say," she said, "that Tir's headed inward to the heart of the Keep. That would be my guess, anyway. Everything me mother learned of the Keeps seems to indicate that places where power centered seemed to lie in a sort of pattern throughout but centered on the midline in the middle third. And the center of the Keep's pattern was the heart of the Keep."

  The Icefalcon nodded. "The laundry rooms in Renweth-which is where the transporter lies-are on the midline," he said. "And the chambers where Tir hid lay at the corners. It makes sense."

  He got to his feet, wiping some of the muck from his hands on his wolfskin tunic, and moved carefully on.

  Tracking by the dim flutter of the torchlight was giving him a headache-even moonlight would have been preferable, being more stable. But Noon always said that the times when one's life depended most on tracking, the light was usually bad.

  "I'm glad I don't have to deal with Oale Niu anymore," sighed Hethya. "She was such a stick."

  "She served her purpose." The Icefalcon never thought he'd achieve tolerance for what this woman had done, but he found he could not dislike her. "And you did her well."

  "She was me Aunt Flory." Hethya laughed a little, drew herself up to the posture associated with the mage of ancient times, and intoned, "Unless that girl is made to wear a corset, Uranwe, she will have no better posture than a peasant. 'A tree may be bent by a child, if the child but bend a twig.' Uranwe was me mother," she added, a little sad. "I always pictured Oale Niu in me mind with Flory's face, and the way Flory did up her hair, in a lot of loops round her ears."

  She paused, seeing the Icefalcon's raised brows, and explained, "It helps to picture someone you're tellin' a tale of. It makes for a better tale."

  "I have never understood," said the Icefalcon, exasperated, "why civilized people wish to make a 'better' tale of something which is not true. It is useful to tell lies to one's enemies, but civilized people make a virtue of falsehood."

  "Ah, it's not a falsehood, me lad," she sighed. "'Tis an art, like singin' or dancin', for the joy of the thing, and the beauty alone. And there's times when it's more. Sometimes when a person's in grief or in pain, that beauty'll carry 'em through until the pain gets less and they can go on. And sometimes when their mind is goin' in a circle of rage or hurt, they can find rest in some image, some way the words gyre, until they can think clearer and find a way through."

  Gil returned to his mind, the intensity of her blue eyes in the glowing magelight as she wove her tales of men who could fly through the air and princesses who led armies through starry darkness to victory with the help of farmboys and smugglers and men wrought of metal and wire. Rudy, he recalled, had told a tale once, of a king stranded for twenty years on a desert island inhabited by two magical spirits and of the man who came to find him and fell in love with his daughter.

  "Cool, punk," Gil had said. "I didn't know you'd ever read The Tempest."

  "What tempest?" Rudy had replied, startled. "I'm talking about Forbidden Planet."

  A drift of voices sounded in the darkness, soft at first but growing nearer. There was a cell several yards up the corridor whose door still partially survived; the Icefalcon indicated bare patches in the floor, and in three tiptoeing leaps made it to the place. Hethya followed so clumsily he wanted to strangle her-any competent enemy could have read her tracks-with Loses His Way helping her over the longest jump.

  Fortunately, the voices belonged to clones, hacking free and gathering into blankets all the vines, all the lichens, all the monstrous, deformed toadstools that they could from the corridor. The Icefalcon cursed as they casually obliterated all trace of the child's tracks. He would be hours picking up the trail again.

  Beside him Hethya whispered, "What are they doing? They can't be going to eat that stuff."

  He clapped his hand over her mouth-the woman would talk through the ruin of the world-and waited until the clones finished their harvest and staggered trying to balance their torches with the unwieldy loads.

  "No," breathed the Icefalcon. "Bektis has returned and informed Vair that there will be no fodder for his black vat."

  "Then I succeeded." Loses His Way's blue eyes shone in the tiny seed of the surviving matchlight. He shut them then for a moment, breathing deep, remembering past the nightmare wall of pain. "It was not in vain."

  "But he's gatherin' up that garbage naytheless."

  "This is Vair we speak of," the Icefalcon pointed out. "He will have his men, and he will have them soon.

  He knows his time i
s short. I think, my enemies, that we must give over our hunt for Tir, at least until we hold the transporter chamber. Then I will return to this place and take up the hunt again."

  "The trail will be cold," Loses His Way warned.

  The Icefalcon gestured at the mess of scraps and shards the three clones had left. "It cannot possibly be colder than it is now, and it may be that the delay will cost us the Keep of Dare. Come. The scout who found the place said it was roundabout to avoid the vines that grow in that whole part of the Keep. It will take us some little time to find."

  In the event, it did not take him as long to locate as he feared it might, though over the next two hours Hethya had a good deal to say concerning the parentage and eventual destinies of Vair na-Chandros, the Icefalcon himself, and the builders of the Keep of the Shadow.

  The explanatory gestures of the scout when talking to Vair had indicated, as such gestures subconsciously do; not only the manner but the direction of his search, and the scout himself had taken not the slightest precaution to cover his own tracks, those of the two demonled clones who'd first discovered the place, or those of the three guards Vair had subsequently dispatched to keep watch in the room.

  It was easy not only to find the place once they cut the man's trail but to determine how many guards were there.

  The fact that Vair needed all his nonclone warriors for other things helped, too. None of those on guard so much as questioned when Loses His Way-bald and beardless and clothed pretty much like everyone else in Vair's party-entered, greeted them with grunts, and killed two of them before any realized what was going on. By that time the Icefalcon and Hethya were through the narrow door and it was all over.

  "Trust Vair, the bastard, not to provide the poor souls with a bite to eat on duty," sighed Hethya after searching the bodies. "Not that I didn't appreciate the pemmican back a while ago, me dear..." She flashed a quick grin at Loses His Way. "Just that it's worn off, if you take my meaning. Me mother would tell me to be glad I'd had that, and stop complaining."

  "That," said the Icefalcon, hauling the clones over into a corner, where they could not be seen from the vestibule, "was said by the Ancestor of All Mothers to the first child born in the world. Personally, I derive little consolation from the knowledge that I have been hungrier in my life."

  He moved along the walls of each chamber in succession, torch in hand, examining the place as a wolf would examine a trap.

  It was as he had seen it in his shadow state, a succession of four chambers, each smaller than the last, dwindling in length in accordance with what he vaguely recognized as some mathematical ratio and connected by open archways flanked with pillars of what appeared to be frosted glass.

  The last chamber of the four was noticeably colder than the other three, and there was a smell there, curious and disturbing, that he could not identify but that made his flesh creep on his bones.

  He walked quickly out of it, back to the small watch fire where Hethya and Loses His Way awaited him, and looked back over his shoulder two or three times, troubled by the impression that when he did so he would see nothing but darkness at his back.

  But there was always only the rear wall.

  The vestibule was, like the suite itself, clear of growths of any sort, a circular chamber some twenty feet in diameter-he could recall no corresponding room in the Keep of Dare-whose inner doorway would barely admit a man. Stepping into the corridor outside, he followed it to where a thick plug of vine had been chopped clear, admitting to the second, spherical vestibule.

  The Wise One stands here, thought the Icefalcon, raising his torch to look around.

  From here he works the spells that enable the transporter to function. Light glimmered, as through a window, and, turning, he saw that there was a window indeed, a convex crystal set into one wall that showed the length of the transporter suite, down to its farthest end.

  Though he had seen no corresponding circle of crystal in the first of the transporter chambers, it was clear that this was where the window opened: he saw plainly the small fire, the dead clones, Loses His Way standing beside the door that was narrower than his own shoulders.

  Hethya went to him and put her hand on that massive back, speaking to him, the Icefalcon thought, though he heard no sound. Loses His Way turned, his blue eyes gentle in the firelight, and sad.

  She asked him something, raising her hand to brush cheekbone and jaw with the backs of her fingers, and the firelight touched her curls with carnelian and put specks of sunset in her eyes.

  There was a wistfulness there, and a hope that tries not to hope. Loses His Way smiled, took the hand still raised in his rough fingers, and shook his head. Then he brought her hand to his lips and leaned down a little-for he was a very tall man, even against her height-and kissed her forehead.

  But what she asked him, and what he replied, the Icefalcon never knew.

  Tir hid for a long time in the darkness. It was peaceful there, and safe. The moss on which he curled was soft beneath his body, the air warm. He slept deeply, dreamed sweetly of long uninterrupted peace. When he woke, he was dimly aware that Vair was furiously angry with Bektis, berating and coldly cursing him for... for what? Tir didn't know, but Bektis' clothing and beard were dotted with blood, and he was flecked all over with ice and snow. In any case, it didn't trouble him. Vair would never, could never, find him here. No one could.

  He became aware of the stirring, the angry susurration of the vines. They didn't stay still. Even the dead ones didn't stay still. They shifted and moved, growing tighter and tighter in certain corridors. Lights crept and stole through them like glowing worms, and Tir became dimly aware that the activity was concentrated, concentrated in a corridor a level down from him and some distance away...

  Cold. There was cold growing in that corridor, even as the vines choked and knotted tight. Wind poured through them, wind that came out of nowhere, enough to tear the flesh from the bones. Water gushed down among the vines, first in drowning torrents, then slowly lessening to a steady trickle as the cold grew.

  The Keep, Tir realized, was trying to kill someone there. Strangle them, blind them, kill them with cold.

  He was overwhelmed with the urge to go back to sleep.

  "Tir?" The word was gasped, nearly soundless, close to the hidden door of the cell. "Tir, are you there?"

  He knew the voice, soft and husky and perpetually half breathless, now breaking with exhaustion and strain. The Icefalcon.

  The door of the cell itself had long ago perished, but the open doorway was concealed within a curiously obscuring gloom, like many of the doors in the Keep. Tir wasn't sure how he himself had found it.

  Maybe the Keep wanted him to. He couldn't see it now from his bed of mosses, even with the glow of the little fire he'd made: it looked as if there were just wall there. Obviously the Icefalcon couldn't see the fire either.

  Silence pressed, a waiting silence, watching. If he answered, thought Tir, he'd then have to do something, leave this place, go outside, be hurt again. The Icefalcon had tracked him as far as this corridor, but the floor of the corridor-far back along the wall on the fifth level-was slick and smooth and would take no tracks. He could stay here in silence. In time the Icefalcon would go away.

  But the Icefalcon was a Guard. And as Lord of the Keep, the Guards were Tir's servants. The Icefalcon would probably go on hunting for him until the Keep killed him.

  Very slowly, Tir got to his feet and walked to where he had marked the door.

  "I'm here," he said, and in speaking felt as if he were giving up silence and peace and warmth forever.

  He reached through the door to show him, his arm and hand vanishing into dense darkness. A moment later ice-cold fingers took his and the Icefalcon stepped out of the black curtain of gloom.

  He was soaked and shivering, a rime of ice on his long pale hair and beard, his face a mass of scratches and his throat bruised black, abraded as if thorns had gripped him like strangling vines. Tir expected him to b
e angry, to demand why Tir hadn't spoken up before, he'd been calling out softly in that corridor for quite some time.

  But he said nothing, only looking around fungus and shadow, gray eyes listening, as if he, too, could hear the whisper of the Keep. Then he looked down at Tir and, reaching out-fingers trembling with cold and exhaustion, something Tir had never seen in this toughest and most aloof of warriors before-touched the half-healed gashes on Tir's face and the black tangle of hair that fell down over his eyes.

  "Is it well with you, Altir?" he asked, and Tir nodded.

  "I'm sorry I didn't say anything before," whispered Tir. "I..."

  His throat closed up. He couldn't explain why he hadn't, why he didn't want to go back. Why he was afraid.

  The Icefalcon gestured the explanation away. "You did speak," he said. "It is all that matters. Did you hide here from demons? They can't really harm you, you know."

  There were claw marks and what looked like bites on his face, and Tir had seen some of Vair's warriors in the corridors-when they could not see him-and knew that what the Icefalcon said wasn't entirely true anymore. At least not here.

  He shook his head. "Vair," he said, not sure if that was what he meant. "I didn't want Vair to find me." He could have left it at that, but it wasn't the entire truth. "I didn't want anybody to find me."

  The Icefalcon knelt by the tiny blaze, held out his hands to it. The white fingers, impossibly long and strong, were chapped and red with the cold, bleeding around the nails, and Tir felt overcome with shame again that everyone had had to try to rescue him when he'd been stupid enough to be kidnapped in the first place.

  "Because you went with Bektis?" asked the Icefalcon, studying his face in silence for a time.

  Tir looked away.

  "He fooled me, too. We all make mistakes, son of Endorion."

  "But we can't afford to," said Tir. "You said that yourself."

  "Some of us are wrong sometimes, too," the Icefalcon said a little ruefully. "I think your mother will be more angry with me for bringing an enemy into the Keep than she will be with you for being deceived by that enemy. As a grown man and a warrior, I should have known better, especially as I knew Bektis for years before the coming of the Dark Ones. The world is as a rule unforgiving, but sometimes we are fortunate enough to redeem our mistakes. We are more fortunate still to be forgiven even without that restitution. Even, I think, Hethya will find it so."