Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 11

Vair na-Chandros and his men made camp beneath the diamond wall of the end of the world, the ice in the North. From the sheltering curve of the shoulder of rock that had once been known as Daylily Hill, the Icefalcon watched them take down the wagon-boxes from their wheels and cut trunks of birch and elder to make sled runners.

"Are all of them mad?" Loses His Way propped his shoulder against a deadfall spruce. "They cannot hope to get those wagons up the wall of the ice."

"It is an elaborate madness," murmured the Icefalcon, folding his arms. The wind that streamed cold and steady from the ice stirred his long braids-he had left off shaving, finally, a few days ago, to let his beard protect his face. "And Vair na-Chandros would seem to have convinced a goodly number to join him in his fantasy."

Though Daylily Hill lay a fair distance from the camp, it was still possible to see what the tiny figures did: chopping trees, slaughtering the remains of the sheep herd, making additional sledges on which wood for fires was being lashed. One man was occupied in taking something from one of the wagon-boxes. "Boots for the mules," said the Icefalcon.

The Chieftain of the Empty Lakes People stared at him as if he'd said they would provide the mules with pink satin ball gowns. "They give their animals boots and let these wretched clones of theirs wrap their feet in hide like slaves?"

"To keep them from skidding on ice," said the Icefalcon. "It is a thing the mud-diggers do in the wintertime, when they wish to take a heavy load from one place to another."

"Why don't they take their heavy loads in the autumn before the fall of the snow?"

"Because they are fools," said the Icefalcon. "They are muddiggers."

But they had carved the bones of the hills to build their road and laid the foundations of bridges that still lay in the riverbeds as fords, even though that road led to the emptiness of the North. They had built the Keeps, proof against all the evil magic of the Dark.

"They are asking for trouble," he added after a time. "Even a child knows you draw and dress an animal if you plan to eat it."

"Perhaps they're in a hurry. They may have seen the horses of the Earthsnake People."

Someone in the Earthsnake People had a spell that kept the horse herd close by their hidden camp, away over behind the hogback called Honey Ridge, and not enough sense not to use it.

"They make camp for the night," pointed out the Icefalcon. "And see, they're only heaping the sheep carcasses up, near the black tent there." The fact that men had erected the black tent against the side of the largest wagon made his nape lift with horror, and he was mindful that the last of the clones had died the previous day.

Several of the laborers apparently agreed with the Icefalcon's estimation of the proper method of transporting dead sheep. There was conference, heads shaken, argument: "What do they do?"

"The finger game," said the Icefalcon. Behind them among the fallen and dying spruces he heard Cold Death laugh. She was communing with Ingold Inglorion through the medium of a pool of frozen meltwater; over the weeks of journeying she had spoken to the old man nearly every night, and they had become fast friends.

"They play it as we would cast a knucklebone, to choose a man for some unpleasant task. Ah," he said, watching one unwilling man head in the direction of Vair na-Chandros, deep in conference with Bektis and the trapmouthed Truth-Finder. "The matter explains itself. Myself, I should not only cast a knucklebone but cheat, were it a matter of speaking to that one."

The chosen unfortunate plainly thought so, too. He bowed and abased himself profoundly, gestured toward the dirty-gray piles of dead beasts.

"Are they dogs, that they let themselves be whipped?" asked Loses His Way, when Vair had made his reply and the messenger, holding his bleeding face, returned to inform his colleagues that yes, his lordship really did want the entire sheep-wool, guts, and all-heaped beside the tent.

"Generally," said the Icefalcon.

The scouts they had sent came back from the glacier. Vair na-Chandros listened to what they said, then turned and studied the ice itself. It towered above the camp, above the hills, an unimaginable opaline fortress whose translucence shed a queer blanched reflection on the faces of the men below. Cold-killed spruce, birch, hickory, and mountain laurel lay in a crushed gray rummage along its base, mixed with and buried under vast avalanche spills and chunks of rotting ice.

A monster, thought the Icefalcon. A monster that would in time eat the world.

"He is mad," Loses His Way repeated after a little, "if he thinks he will get all his possessions to the top."

The Icefalcon shook his head. "Whatever else may be said of this Vair na-Chandros," he murmured, "he is not mad."

The boy Tir was escorted from among the wagons. "It is well the woman is there to look after him," said Loses His Way. "She is good, that one."

"She is the one who deceived him into leaving the protection of the Keep," retorted the Icefalcon, with whom the subject of Hethya still rankled.

Loses His Way shook his head. "I have watched her now many weeks," he said. "People can be pressed into any hunting, good or ill, o my enemy. She cares for the child, and cares more for him each day. She has the way of one who has had a child herself. Has the boy been here, then?" For Tir made signs, pointing along the right side of the talus.

The Icefalcon hesitated, not sure what to say. "It is a knowledge in his family."

"But how can he know what does not exist?" How indeed?

He himself had gone to scout another way up the glacier, on the far side of Daylily Hill, a deep crevice and chimney that could be scaled with the help of axes. The road led to the North, but the end of the road was now covered in the trackless ice. Vair asked another question, and Tir assented, seeming very small and helpless among the men.

If you strike him again, thought the Icefalcon, though he is no kin of mine and has no claim on me, still I will have an accounting from you.

But Vair did not strike the child. Instead he gestured to Hethya, who even at this distance the Icefalcon could tell was possessed by the spirit-or imitating the mannerisms-of Oale Niu.

"What new hunt is this?" murmured Loses His Way.

Cold Death came over to them, having finished filling Ingold in on everything that had so far passed that day. The old man had finally reached Renweth Vale, she had informed them yesterday, having come down from the north over the St. Prathhes' Glacier, a nearly impassable trek; he had been most interested in Vair's journey.

"Did you see this when you shadow-walked into the camp?" she breathed, and the Icefalcon shook his head.

"It was packed in its boxes in a wagon." His voice was the murmur of ice winds through the naked roots of fallen trees. "I thought the boxes had about them an evil light, like the thing in the tent. Do you know what it is?"

She shook her head.

Under Hethya's instructions, the crates were opened, the pieces lifted out and put together by Bektis and the Truth-Finder, helped by the scout the Icefalcon called Crested Egret, a clever young man who managed to stay at Vair's side without ever incurring his wrath. Tubes of gold of varying thicknesses looped over balls of glass, crystal rods bound in iron and covered over with brittle-looking encrustations of salt.

"Is she indeed possessed of the spirit of an Ancestor of the shamans?" asked Loses His Way, as Hethya moved forward to help connect the many components into one single, sleekly lumpy finger, glittering like an extension of the ice wall itself.

"Either that or some instruction survived, writ on paper or embedded in the heart of a Wise One's crystal, that she studied to lend credence to her lies." The Icefalcon, crouching beside him, rested his crossed hands on his drawn-up knees. "Anyone can make up stories, it is an art among the mud-diggers, and many are adept at it."

"Pah," said Loses His Way. "She has not the look of a woman who tells lies."

Oh, hasn't she? he thought. But he only said, "it has something of the look of the things we found in the Keep many years ago. Rudy and Ingold made of them weapons that spat fire at the bidding of the Wise Ones, but they did not work overwell. They needed no Ancestor of shamans to show them how such things were made."

Slowly, with dignity, Hethya walked around the apparatus, touching the tubes and the rods, the balls that fit sometimes into the rods and sometimes into one another.

Bektis nodded wisely at her side. Gil, thought the Icefalcon, would be open-mouthed with awe, but to him it was merely what it was, glass and iron, gold and salt, elements of the earth that had existed in their current form only somewhat longer than other formations of the same substances.

Hethya emphasized a point with a sweeping gesture that would have shamed a marketplace preacher in the days before the coming of the Dark, and her voice carried dimly across space to the three watchers-possibly to other watchers as well.

Still, it was a wonder when it was finished. It lay glistening in a cradle of geared wheels such as Ingold tinkered with in the crypts of the Keep, haloed, it seemed, by some curious condensation of the thin wicked afternoon light.

Tir hung back, as if he would conceal himself between the wagons-he came forward when Vair beckoned, but unwillingly and, when asked a question, would only shake his head.

Hethya and Bektis stood beside the new apparatus. It was Hethya who worked its ivory levers, making the whole of it swing about suddenly, like a live thing, articulate, quivering, balanced to a hair. Bobs and wires whipped like the antennae of an insect, and lights sang from the jewels that hung on their tips.

A strange shiver passed through the Icefalcon, the uneasy sense that Gil-Shalos was right. This was more than elements combined. There was a silence like the silence before an ice storm, a hushed waiting fear of the unimaginable.

Bektis laid his hands where Hethya showed him-tiny figures, gray and gold, white and red against the flinty gray rocks, the rinsed out aqua ice.

Then a flash, less like lightning than as if a star had spoken a curse of power, a curse that extended like a tickling feather a delicate, whickering, colorless whisper of unseen flame.

The sound that cracked across the valley was, the Icefalcon was sure, only the sound of the rock splintering where the shimmer touched it.

A great chunk separated from the wall of the promontory before them, pitching down the scree. Then like the sea-yammer came the wild whinnying of the mules and horses and all the men crying out.

Even old Nargois, whom the Icefalcon had observed to be a man of calm courage, fell back, hands fluttering in the signs against demons. Only Vair remained where he was, observing with interest as Hethya moved the levers again.

Bektis, who had flinched, stepped forward to lay his hands upon the apparatus again. Another shimmer, as if the air between the crystal horns of the machine and the raw rock wall had flawed, like the break in a pane of glass. The Icefalcon saw a slab of rock jerk outward, break, and tumble free down the slope before he heard the sound of it, a deep, booming crack and the hiss of heat.

"This is bad hunting," whispered Loses His Way, when any of them could speak again.

Bad hunting indeed, thought the Icefalcon. Three weeks' journey away that they were, he could not but feel that things would be worse still for the folk of the embattled Keep.

"What did she say?" Gil and Minalde both got to their feet as Ilae emerged from the hidden chamber in the crypt. The young mage stood in the doorway for a moment, a tall gawky girl, and gestured with one long-fingered hand that she was all right.

Encountering Brycothis, the mage spirit who dwelled in the heart of the Keep, was, Rudy had told Gil, frequently a disorienting experience.

Both Rudy and Ingold had tried to describe what it was like; Gil had the impression it was something only fully understood by another mage.

Brycothis herself-Gil had seen her image in half a dozen of the ancient record crystals, a rangy woman with smiling eyes and the tattooed scalp of a wizard of those days-had long ago transmuted into something far other than human, a pattern of memories and power whose center lay in the heart of the crypts. Those who entered that center, whose minds touched hers, experienced different things at different times.

"Did she speak to you?" Not that Brycothis actually spoke. Minalde led the girl to the bottom step of the hidden stairway, where she and Gil had waited, and made her sit down.

"Oh, yes." Ilae nodded hesitantly. "I mean, I saw things. She was there." She nodded quick thanks as Gil handed her the flask of tisane-now lukewarm-she and Alde had been sharing. "But I didn't understand what I saw."

Gil and Alde were silent. Shy and slow-spoken at the best of times, Ilae thought for a while, then said, "I asked her, Was there another way into the Keep. And I saw..." She spread out her hands helplessly. "I saw the laundry room up on the third level, back behind the sanctuary of the Church."

"The laundry room?" Gil almost laughed.

Minalde asked worriedly, "Are you sure?" Not because she thought Ilae would have been mistaken about anything she saw, wizards as a rule didn't make that kind of error-but simply because it made no sense.

"Sure as I'm sitting, m'Lady."

"But it's in the middle of the Keep," said Alde, baffled. "You couldn't have a secret passage going into it without it passing through my bedroom, or the sanctuary, or Lord Ankres' storerooms..."

"Christ, are we going to have to take measurements?" Gil asked, appalled. "That whole area behind the Aisle has been so changed and remodeled, with walls and cells partitioned and knocked together and new corridors put through, we'll never get an accurate reading. There's a dozen secret passages there already, going from one set of rooms to another. I don't even want to think about it."

"And in any case the entry has to be at or near ground level," Minalde protested. "Which means a stairway-maybe in the outer wall? At least we know it's in the rear quarter of the Keep."

"But who would have known of it?" Ilae asked. "And who'd Vair get to turn traitor? And how? It ain't like there's a stranger come, or anybody gone recently."

"If it exists at all," said Gil softly. "I'll tell Janus and we can make a search, and it better be a damn quiet one because the fewer people who know about this one the better. But if there's another doorway, I'm betting it's one only a wizard can see. That means you, Ilae, and Wend outside. You up for it?"

"I have to be," Ilae said simply. "Don't I?"

She corked the flask and got to her feet, preceding them up the snail-shell curl of the stair, the witchlight with which she had illuminated the chamber drifting ahead. Gil and Alde followed more slowly, Alde thriftily blowing out their single candle. The witchlight salted the embroidery of her overgown with sharp white sparks and glinted in the pins that held back her long hair.

When Ilae got farther ahead of them, Alde asked Gil, "Do you think there's a doorway somewhere behind the Aisle? Hidden by spells?"

"I think we'd better look for one," said Gil. "But no. I think it's something different. Something else."

He was the only person who could warn them.

Tir pulled the furs of his little bed nest closer around him and listened to the howling of the wind. It blew strong enough down from the glacier to rock the wagon on its new-made runners, and now and then it shrieked, like the ghost of a tormented man.

He had worked out, pretty much, what he had to do, and he would sooner have walked up and spit in Vair's face than go through with it.

The night was bitterly cold. Maybe too cold to get out of his furs. He might freeze to death. It sounded like a comforting alternative. He was the only person who knew about the chen yekas-that was the term for the machine he'd seen that afternoon, the terrible thing that spit, instead of fire, that cruel strange streak of purplish nonlight.

The word was clear in his mind, clear as his sister's name. He was the only person who knew the secret of Vair's tethyn warriors, though Vair and Hethya used another word for them that was what Hethya said Oale Niu called them.

But tethyn was what they had called them back in the deeps of time that his ancestor remembered. He was the only person who knew the most terrible secret of how it might be possible for him to warn the Keep.

And there was no way out of doing what he knew he was going to have to do.

Before she'd gone out Hethya had untied his wrists. Even though she bandaged them carefully they were always raw and bleeding. Lord Vair checked the spancels on them every day.

The thought that Hethya would get in trouble for giving him that fragment of comfort, that scrap of dignity, tormented him. If Lord Vair ever found out about the knife in his boot it would mean a beating-worse than a beating-not only for Tir but for Hethya, too.

But Rudy was dead. His mother was dead, too, Bektis had told him, dead of grief because he, Tir, had been such a fool as to go with Bektis out of the Keep.

It was all his fault. If it was just him, he would deserve everything, including death.

But Wend and Ilae would still be at the Keep. And Ingold was out there, too, somewhere, and those two young wizards would have contacted the old man, first thing, in their magic crystals. At the Keep they still had a chance.

Tir took a deep breath.

Like everyone else in the camp he slept in most of his clothes. Cautiously, moving the way the Guards had taught him, he found his heavy jacket by touch. He'd put it in the same place every night: the Icefalcon had told him about that.

No light penetrated the blankets hung over the back and front of the wagon-covers against the cold. He edged among the bags and packets of food, the bundled, dirty smelling clothes that they'd stripped off the poor tethyn when they died.

He eased the jacket to him and slithered into it, checked that his mittens were in the pockets, and pulled on both his fleece cap and the jacket's hood.

Rudy had told him many times that the world was getting colder and that the lands near the Ice in the North were colder even than Renweth Vale in winter; Tir could not remember being so cold in his life.

In another life, he thought... One of those other little boys had been this cold. Maybe several. He didn't recall clearly, and sometimes he knew that he didn't want to.

He put on his mittens. He was trembling, and the dull ache in the pit of his stomach that never seemed to go away was a churning agony now, but he knew he didn't have much time. Hethya would be back, at least.

He wadded up his pillow and a blanket to make it look as if he were still buried under the covers. Then he slipped to the back of the wagon and listened.

The guard was there. After several minutes he heard him cough. Somewhere a mule brayed, mournful despite its blankets in the icy cold. The scrunch of footfalls, and a man's voice said, "Ugal," in greeting, the guard's name, the big handsome young man who'd given him the dates.

"Pijek." Pijek was one of the sergeants.

Sometimes after Lord Vair had mistreated Tir, Ugal sent him bits of dried fruits or sweets but had never actively taken his part-in fact he sometimes explained why what Lord Vair was doing was for Tir's own good. Tir didn't blame him, but he couldn't eat the sweets. Most of the time he felt so sick with terror that he couldn't eat at all.

Ugal asked, "Has he finished?"

"Still making the rounds." At least that's what Tir thought Pijek said; the man had an accent of some kind, and Tir's grasp of the ha'al, though enormously improved, was far from perfect. "He's asked Yantres and Nicor and Tuuves, Hastroaal and Ti Men..." Tir knew most of the men of whom they spoke. "Near a score."

"There going to be another fight?"

"Seems like. Nicor said they caught sign of savages. If"-there was a phrase Tir didn't know-"we're going to need all the men we can get."

Savages. White Raiders.

Tir groped his way back along the long side of the wagon, carefully shifting the sacks of parched corn and beans aside. His small body wriggled easily between them, until his hands encountered the wooden side itself. It took only seconds to work loose the inner coverings and worm up under them, over the side of the wagon, under the outer covering, and to let himself drop.

The drop wasn't nearly as far as it had been when the wagonbox was up on wheels. The runners provided better cover, too. After the wagon's dark, the reflected torchlight from the camp seemed bright, the cold cosmic. Tir crouched in the shadows, heart pounding so hard he could barely breathe, orienting himself.

He was on the outside of the circle of wagons. He knew he would be-they always brought them around in a ring the same way. Slunch glowed on the dark slopes of the flooded valley through which they'd worked their way for the past three days. Above them the glacier towered, not a single wall like St.

Prathhes' Glacier in Renweth Vale, but a rampart of ice, a universe of cold, slowly devouring the world.

He could see where it lay between the Big Guardian and the Little (and some other boy whispered in his mind the names they had borne all those years ago), the land at its feet drowned in milky, shallow pools.

The Ice in the North.

Men stood guard around the perimeter of the camp. Lord Vair's men, his chosen legions, loyal to him, loving him despite what he did to them. Their black helmets were decorated with his bronze peacock crest, through which their hair-white or black, like horsetails-rose in fluttering pennons.

The last of the tethyn had died yesterday afternoon, though they'd been stumbling for days. Tir thought about the White Raiders, and the fewness of the men left.

Dimly, Tir was aware that a magician, with the right equipment, could make tethyn out of men. Someone in another life, someone in the dark of his memory, had seen it done.

As he watched Lord Nargois walk from guard to guard, touching this man on the shoulder, speaking gently to that man, he knew that was what the old man was planning to do now.

He'd seen it done. He knew he'd seen it done. Somewhere... someone...

And he knew he didn't ever want to see it again.

But he had to, so he could tell Ingold what was going on.

That was what Janus, and Gil, and the Guards all said, when they talked about war and scouting in the watchroom after training was done.

"If you're alone and can't do anything else," Gil had said once, gesturing with those thin strong hands-broken fingers taped together, wrists strapped up in leather-"don't be a hero. Don't get yourself killed. Just observe everything you can in as much detail as you can, so you can report back."

She'd been talking to a couple of the new kids, the young men and women just being trained in the hard school of warfare; she hadn't even been aware of Tir sitting quietly in the corner by the hearth.

"Something that may not look important to you may be a critical piece of information to someone who knows something else." Ingold would know how to save the Keep.

Tir crawled forward among the shadows, circling until he reached the largest wagon, the one that was connected to the black tent. He'd seen Lord Vair already, coming out of the tent, pausing to talk to Nargois and to Shakas Kar, the southern Truth-Finder with his shaven head and his nasty little hard smile and his crimson belts. Men were dragging a sledge across the camp from the supply lines, the smell of carrion suffocating: it contained the bodies of all the tethyn who had died, some of them many days ago.

"Take it in." Lord Vair gestured with the whip that never left him. He never used his right hand, his hook hand, keeping it instead in the folds of sleeve and cloak, as though that whole arm had been consecrated to evil and shame.

Ugal and others had told Tir that their lord had lost his hand in cavalry training in his youth, which had for years disbarred him from military command, until the coming of the Dark. "He would have had honor and glory years ago but for that," Ugal had said, apologizing for the commander he loved. "You can see why he is angry."

The tent stirred already with activity, and Tir smelled from it the dusty stink of the dead sheep and the thick loamy pong of dirt, choking in the fire-touched dark.

"My Lord, I must protest." Bektis appeared from between the wagons, bundled in a velvet coat lined with mammoth wool that came down to his heels. He had a muff of white fur on one hand, the hand where he wore the jeweled Device all the time now, and a dozen sables wrapped around his neck.

"We know how to operate the dethken iares..." Only that wasn't the real name of the thing in the tent, thought Tir. It was called a chknaies. Who had known that? "... with a single... ah"-he glanced at the young guardsman standing nearby-"source." He took Lord Vair's arm, led him a little apart, closer to the wagon beneath which Tir crouched. More softly, he went on, "My Lord, I cannot vouch for what might happen."

"It is your business to know what will happen," snapped Vair. "I thought you claimed expertise in this matter, sorcerer. I thought you said you knew everything of such machines and of the mages who created them." The razor-edged voice sank soft, turning Tir's belly cold and sick. "Is this not then the case?"

"Of course it is the case," Bektis replied quickly. "It's just that it was not considered safe..."

"Flesh is flesh," replied Vair. "Did you not say that the dead flesh is multiplied within the vat? That it can only duplicate itself so far with the substance of the victim, but that the machine knows the image of that which is to be created? Is this not then how it works?"

"Of a certainty it is," replied the mage, but his long fingers emerged from the muff to tangle and twist the snowy lovelocks of his beard.

"We need men." Vair's voice was hard now, though no louder than the whisper of the ice wind razoring from the crumbling ramparts above. "The savages gather around us, and it is still some days to our destination. Once we get on the ice we can be taken at a disadvantage. And we must needs still have enough men at our disposal to consummate the taking of Dare's Keep. Now, can it be done as I wish or not?"

"My most illustrious Generalissimo..."

"Every machine can be tinkered with, sorcerer, by those who truly understand them. You say this Harilomne did it, this heretic whose studies of the ancients taught you in your turn. Don't treat me like a commoner. Every expert can adjust and change."

His voice was like the grip of the hooks in Tir's collar, in Tir's flesh. "This is why one brings experts, instead of leaving them to perish at the hands of those hypocrites who wish to foist blame for their own crimes upon the heads of their tools. Not so, sorcerer?"

Bektis bowed his head. "It is so indeed, Lord."

"Then I trust you will make the necessary adjustments?"

"I will do so, Lord."

"Good," Vair said softly. "Good."

He walked away toward the tent where he slept; Bektis to the camp's central fire, where Hethya stood, warming her gloved hands. Hethya, Bektis, Vair, Shakas Kar, Nargois... Tir counted them off on his fingers, then wriggled along the hard-frozen ground to the back of the largest wagon-sledge.

Even the three sides of the wagon-box had been given a petticoat of canvas and goat-hair cloth so that the space beneath, if not precisely warm, was at least protected from the winds. The legs of a table were visible in the long flat rectangle of reddish light burning within, surrounded by a horrible jumble of carrion shapes.

On one sledge lay the pitiful sheep, with cut throats and blood drying on their wool; on another, a lumpy mass, covered with a goat-hair blanket, that stank and dripped. A third sledge, behind the others, was heaped with random things, brush and cut wood and even piles of dirt.

Tir crawled to the edge of the wagon-box where the curtains began. There were at least four layers of them, to cut both cold and any possibility of light seeping out.

He crawled between them, like a mouse in a bed curtain, until he was behind the sledges with their gruesome burdens, where the smell was awful but the light of lamps and candles did not penetrate. Then he chinked the curtains a little and peeked through.

The iron tub up in the wagon-box, arches looming over it like the ribs of an unknown beast. Two big lumps of gold-woven crystal set at angles to its unarched end and the jointed canopy of glittering mesh suspended above.

Steps went up from the tent to the wagonbox, but even after the men who'd hauled in the dirt and corpses departed, Tir dared not emerge to have a closer look. In the main part of the tent there was a folding table, with what looked like a box on it.

He tallied it all in his mind.

And pounding him, tearing him, whispering in the blackness of the back of his brain was the knowledge that he'd seen all this before. That he knew what was in the box on the table.

The curtains covering the entrance heaved and blew. Tir let the hanging fall shut to almost nothing. He had to know. There had to be somebody who knew, who could tell Ingold.

It was Bektis and Nargois. With them was Ugal, big and handsome and friendly, taking off his spiked helmet and looking around him with awed gray eyes. Tir's heart stood still with horror and grief. No. Not him.

But there was nothing that he could say or do.

At Bektis' direction (Bektis never did any work) Ugal and Nargois carried two dead sheep and a great quantity of wood and dirt up the steps, the planks creaking under their weight. They went down for another load, and Tir looked away when they pulled back the cover over the other sledge. The stench, the horrible bloated black bodies with the flesh falling away...

He knew he should be brave and look but he couldn't. He kept his face buried in his arms while their feet creaked up the plank steps. He tried not to hear the noise the things made when dropped into the vat. If he threw up they'd find him. That awareness was the only thing that kept him from doing so.

Then he heard Vair's voice.

"Ugal, is it?" There was gentleness in his tone, and affection, like a strong father addressing a son.

"Yes, my Lord." Ugal was delighted with the recognition, delighted that his generalissimo knew his name.

He was always telling Tir, My Lord praised me or My Lord spoke to me-I think he knows my name.

"Do you understand the help I need from you? The magnitude of the task I'm asking you to do?"

"I-I think I do, my Lord. None of us really..."

"None of you really knows. No. That is as it should be, but it makes your help-your willingness to help-a gift of trust doubly to be treasured. Please understand how much I value that."

Tir raised his head and looked. The shadows behind the dead sheep were dense as night, and he could open quite a slit between the hangings. He saw Lord Vair touch the young man Ugal's face with his left hand, like a caress.

"Thank you, Lord."

"You understand this will hurt a little."

Behind Lord Vair, Shakas Kar entered the tent, silently.

Vair went on, "It isn't much, but sometimes men have cried out, you remember."

"I won't cry out."

"Sometimes men do," said Vair. "There is a drug, you understand, that weakens the subject; would you be willing to wear a gag? That way there can be no fears, no apprehensions on the part of your friends."

"I am willing to do whatever you wish, Lord, but I promise you, I will not weaken."

"Good man." Vair stepped forward and embraced the young soldier. "Good man."

No! Tir screamed, despairing, silent. Run away, Ugal! Run away!

Tir watched as the young man stripped, and Shakas Kar stepped forward with a gag of metal and leather. Bektis offered the young man a cup first, which he drank as if it were sacramental wine.

They gagged him then, and Hethya came in, with the haughty mien of Oale Niu, her eyes like stone. She and Shakas Kar brought from the table the black stone box, which contained-as Tir knew it would-a set of needles, some crystal, some silver, some iron, eight or ten inches long and tipped in jewels or beads of glass.

These they drove into the young man's flesh, at certain points-thohar points, whispered one of those distant memories, bringing with it a shudder of blackness, a desperate desire not to see anything further-while Ugal stood tall and beautiful, naked, head thrown back, wincing a little at the stabs but silent and proud.

He had a knotted war-scar on one thigh and another on his left arm, and with his long white hair hanging about his shoulders he seemed like a splendid animal, like a father or an elder brother Tir had always craved.

When the needles were all in his flesh Hethya and Bektis helped him climb up the wooden steps and lie down in the great iron vat with the carrion and the wood and dirt-as a warrior Ugal would have encountered worse.

They adjusted something inside. Maybe, thought Tir, so that the needles sticking out of his back wouldn't be pushed crooked when he lay down.

He knew what was going to happen. In the dark of his mind he knew. Some one of his ancestors, under circumstances Tir could not imagine, had seen this done.

Bektis walked over to the head of the tub and stood beneath the hanging swags of iron and crystal net.

He closed his eyes. Tir saw Hethya look away.

He was glad it all happened in the tub, where he didn't have to look. He was glad Ugal was gagged, and drugged, too, though the young man did make noises through it, stifled screams and worse sounds, body sounds: squirtings and gushings; horrible, sodden, elastic pops, like leather exploding under pressure, and blood spraying up.

Once Ugal's head bounced up over the rim of the tub and Tir had to clap his hands over his mouth, press his eyes shut, swallow back the bile that came dribbling then out his nose.

I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to do this, and he clung desperately to consciousness, unable to breathe, his mind screaming. I have to do this.

Ingold had to know.

But he couldn't look, while footfalls creaked-Bektis' or Hethya's, and there was a soft noise of squishing, and the plop of something dripping where it had been spattered up onto the canopy. All he could remember was the taste of dates, carried and treasured with a young man's cravings for sweets, all the way up from the devastated South.

Then there was another sound, a muted, deadly whickering, like fire but thinner; an aura of power that raised the hair on Tir's head. He bit down on his own sleeve, sinking his teeth into the dirty-tasting leather to keep from fainting, screaming, crying.

In front of him he saw Hethya hand Shakas Kar something-the iron gag. Shakas Kar wiped it down with a rag. From the vat Tir heard the sounds of movement, thrashing, and saw the wagon-bed rock.

Don't scream, he told himself. Whatever you do, don't scream.

A man's voice cried out random strings of sounds. An identical voice answered, "Atuthes! Atuthes!"

Tir recognized the ha'al word for father. Something bleated, like a sheep with human vocal chords.

Vair climbed the plank steps, swinging his whip a little in his gloved left hand. "Perfect," he whispered, looking down into the vat. "Perfect."

Tir watched-Tir made himself watch-while the tethyn all came down from the vat. This part wasn't bad, except that they all had Ugal's face, they all had Ugal's body, though without the scars.

Like the Akulae they were hairless, and their skin looked funny, though in the lamplight it was hard to tell what was just tricks of shadow and moisture: patchy, smooth in places and rough in others.

There were eleven of them.

Nargois brought clothing out of the bales along the walls and gave it to them, but they only stood there staring at it stupidly, and he had to show them how to dress.

This troubled the second in command. He passed a hand before the face of one Ugal and addressed him.

The man answered with a faint, bleating grunt.

"It doesn't matter," said Vair shortly. "They'll fight. That's all that matters. Ugal!" he said, in a voice of command, and they all turned their heads at once, in a single movement.

"It is good," he said to Bektis. "It is good."

The men filed out when they were dressed, lumbering and shuffling in heavy coats, in wrapped rawhide leggings, Nargois nudging them along like a skinny black pale-eyed sheepdog.

Eleven, thought Tir. There had never been more than four of any group of tethyn. He remembered-out of where he didn't know-that four was all you could get, sometimes only three. Eleven was bad.

When Nargois brought in another young man-when Vair said in that warm, friendly, fatherly voice,

"Hastroaal isn't it?" and Hastroaal replied eagerly, "Yes, my Lord"-Tir worked his way, with infinite slowness, back through the curtains, out into the darkness under the wagon, and so through the petticoat around the wagon's bed and out to the outer blackness.

"You understand the help I need from you? The greatness of the task I'm asking you to do?"

"You know I'd follow you to the ends of time, my Lord..."

"Good man. Good man..."

Tir relieved himself away from the wagons-his bowels were liquid with disgust and fright-and then climbed back into his own wagon, snaking through the provisions to return to his nest of furs. His hands trembled so badly he could barely take off his mittens and coat, and he felt cold through to the marrow.

The cold stayed with him, even under his blankets, growing deeper and deeper so that Tir wondered if he were dying. He tried to stay awake because he knew that when he went to sleep he'd remember fully, remember when he or that other boy had actually seen the whole thing, actually seen what happened in the iron vat (which was called a draik, he remembered, and wanted to scream at them, Stop telling me these things!).

He woke up screaming, being shaken by a guard, an older man named Mongret, to whom he clung, sobbing, feeling as if his body would tear itself apart.

"Is all right, Keshnithar," the man soothed him, calling him by the name some of the guards used when Vair wasn't there to hear: Keshnithar, Little King, though sometimes in good-natured jest they called him Drazha, Scarface. "Is all right. Oniox," he called out to another man who had come by, "get the lady, would you? Our boy's had a nightmare."

The other guard glanced back at the black tent and grunted. "Small blame to him. The very air's evil tonight. She's over there."

"Oh." There was silence, the men looking at each other through the thrown-back curtain at the back of the wagon. "Ah. Well." Mongret hugged Tir again, reassuring, but Tir knew that nobody was going to get Hethya.

He wasn't even sure if he wanted to see her, for her clothing would smell of carrion and power and lightning, and he didn't know if he could stand that. "Is just dreams, Little King," he added, in broken Wathe. "You all right?"

Tir sniffled, fighting hard not to seem a coward, and said, "I'll be all right," in the ha'al, which made both men smile.

"That's my little soldier." The men liked him, though none of them would stand up to Vair for him. He didn't blame them for this. Neither commented on the fact that his hands weren't tied. "You want me stay a little, till you sleep?"

Tir nodded. The man didn't speak the Wathe well enough to learn anything if he talked in his sleep.

Mongret dried his tears with a rough, mittened hand, and Tir lay down, though he didn't sleep.

There was an odd comfort in knowing that whichever of his ancestors it was who had, willing or unwilling, witnessed what he had witnessed-who had seen the skin peel back, the organs burst, the head swell and pop like an overripe grape-had been as sickened, as appalled, as terrified as he; had wished, like him, that he had never seen it. It was as awful for a grown man as it was for a little boy.

It was almost daylight when Heytha returned to the wagon, took off her heavy outer garments, and curled up in her blankets. She smelled of the cheap southern rum from the keg in the back of the food wagon, which they sometimes distributed when the nights were very cold.

Tir listened to her breathing. He didn't think she slept. Later on in the morning, when they were breaking camp, Tir saw that the camp was crowded with tethyn, over a hundred of them, and all with those strangely patched-looking skins, all with the same few faces: Tuuves, Hastroaal, Ti Men... Their eyes were blank, not like the eyes of the Akulae or of the tethyn who'd formed the train from Bison Knoll.

Those had been slow and stupid but human. Though some of these could speak, others only grunted or made soft noises in their throats. When Tir encountered Ugal, wearing makeshift clothing and rawhide wrapped around his feet instead of boots, he had to run away behind one of the wagons and vomit.

He was still kneeling there, soaked with sweat and shaking, when Hethya found him and told him that she had to take him to Vair. It was time the train moved on, out onto the ice itself.