Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 16

"Huh," said Hethya. "So it's yourself again."

She'd been dreaming about her daughter and the forest Keep. Dreaming about the rooms that had been carved off the crypts in those long years between the time when the Dark Ones had returned to their underground realms and the time when the forest Keeps had ceased to be fortresses with the return of order and the rule of the High Kings of Gae.

She'd been playing hide-and-seek with her child while her scholar mother investigated the caches of long-buried junk at the bottom of those twisty wooden stairs: hibernant glowstones gone dark with time, old chests of brown brittle scrolls, broken furniture and hidden doorways concealing still-deeper fastnesses, still-more-curious treasures.

Her daughter could only toddle but staggered with a child's blithe tumbledown delight among the shadowy warrens, barely illuminated by the lamps that Hethya and her mother bore; her laughter was gay in the dark.

But with the Icefalcon's appearance in the crypts of Prandhays Keep Hethya transfigured once more to a woman of thirty, a little blowsy, a little haggard, with bitter eyes and the dirty hair of one who has traveled far and hard. She put her hands on her hips, and leaned her back against a plastered archway, and asked, "And what is it you'll be wanting now?"

It was hard to speak the words. "Your help," he said. "Please." The Icefalcon took her hand-his own no more than shreds of flesh clinging to white bone-and led her across into the Shadow Keep, dark tunnels cancerous with fungus and strange white ivies.

He was very cold now, disoriented and weary beyond speaking, every wound and gash given him by the demons of the misty air open, bleeding, weakening him; drawing away his concentration from the task of keeping bone and flesh clear in his memory. The sun kept coming back into his mind, and the free flight in the air, the desire to dissolve and to sleep.

He was beginning to realize that he might not make it back to his body. If it were destroyed he knew he would not last long but did not know what would become of him in that event.

"Did you find a way out?" asked Hethya. A reasonable request, but in his weariness he felt a flash of dull rage at her, a desire, unprecedented in his experience, to strike her across the face.

"No." It was unworthy of a person of the Talking Stars-and also a pointless expenditure of energy-to show anger. Also, he would not give her that. So he kept his voice neutral.

"I was unable to leave the Keep until the Doors opened, and then I found Bektis had encountered Cold Death: she fled from him, I know not where. Here."

There was a guard outside the door of the triple cell where the vat and its horrors had been set up, one of the very few that still possessed a solid door. The corpses of the slain had been dragged there and heaped in a corner; bundled bales of dead foliage and whatever else could be gathered: fungus, the last of the wood, a dead mule.

A new, stout bar had been slotted into the makeshift sockets on the door, though the Icefalcon knew that Loses His Way was bound. Had he not been, the wood, long dehydrated in the cold, might not have held him.

Because it was a dream the Icefalcon passed easily through the thick wood, and Hethya stepped gamely behind.

"Faith!" she whispered, shocked.

Not, the Icefalcon was certain, because of the bodies. Anyone who had passed through the Time of the Dark had seen bodies, in all stages of decomposition and ruin. Certainly this woman had seen worse if she'd watched the making of the clones.

Even the fact that the clones had begun to decay in the warmth of the Keep was something she already knew. She went over to where the Icefalcon's own body lay on the pile, forehead and eyelids smudged with the remains of Cold Death's ward-spells, and touched his face, something the Icefalcon found extremely disturbing.

"Faith, are you a ghost, then?"

"No." He said it a good deal more vehemently than he had intended. "I am alive, only separated from my flesh for the time being."

It crossed his mind to wonder whether that was in fact the case. Whether removal from the ice-cave, and from Cold Death's spells, had in fact killed the life-spark of the emptied flesh so that he would return only to die as the body died.

Could he return at all without Cold Death's help?

"But I can be of no help to you if I return to my flesh in a locked room with guards outside. You will have to get me out."

On the floor beside the piled corpses, Loses His Way lay chained, spanceled the way the Alketch spanceled deserters or criminals, wrists locked to ankles, with a cord around his neck tied to the short chain that joined the ankle manacles, only long enough to permit him to breathe as long as he did not struggle.

While the Icefalcon watched, Loses His Way tried to twist free his wrists nevertheless, veins bulging out at his temples with the tightening of the noose, until he dropped back limp again, chest heaving with the thread of incoming air.

"Leave it, me bonny," said Hethya softly, going to kneel beside him. "Leave it, you great fool. You'll only murder yourself." Her hand reached again, touched the blood-smeared red-gold hair.

The Icefalcon heard footfalls in the corridor and stepped back, shadow hand touching shadow sword.

Hethya, her eyes on Loses His Way's face, swung around in shock as the door opened and Vair na-Chandros strode in at the head of a small squad of warriors, and her hand went to her mouth.

"They can't see you," pointed out the Icefalcon, catching her arm to steady her. It interested him that for once she did not scream. "This is only a dream, you know."

Vair gestured to the dead. The clones, without a word spoken, began to strip them, pulling off footgear, weapons, furs. He glanced down at Loses His Way and said to Bektis in the Wathe, "What do you think? The lords of the borderlands tell me that White Raiders are without loyalty to their own people and can easily be turned to fight against other Raiders."

"This has been my experience as well, illustrious Lord." As usual Bektis bowed a little as he spoke.

Though immaculate as always-and still smoking very faintly with a personal heat-spell-the Icefalcon thought there was a suggestion of tension to the corners of his eyes, that the lines of strain were cut very deep indeed in the high dome of the forehead, and when he stroked the Hand of Harilomne his long fingers trembled.

"Indeed, for several years there was a barbarian in the High King's Guard, and he showed no compunction in turning his sword against his own brethren. They are utterly without loyalty."

"And you are utterly without brains," the Icefalcon said, "if you don't know the difference between my kindred the Talking Stars People and such cowardly vermin as the Salt People, the Empty Lakes People, and the Black Rock People who attacked the lands of the Wathe. And twice so if you think that I would raise my hand against the children of my own Ancestors, you witless dotard."

"Faith, is that a fact?" asked Hethya, surprised.

Did she really believe that such obvious trash as the Black Rock People could be related to the People of the Talking Stars? The Icefalcon opened his mouth to flay her ignorance, but Vair went on: "To he sure we could use another whole man in our forces, if we could be sure of his loyalty."

"Loyalty?" roared Loses His Way, heaving furiously in his bonds. His voice came out hoarse from strangulation.

More's the pity, reflected the Icefalcon, that he didn't strangle himself into silence.

Noon had always taught him that the longer an enemy thought you could not understand his speech, the better off you would be. "Loyalty to you, you night-walking jackal? You murderer of my kin? Before I'd take one step back at your orders I'd walk over a cliff!"

The Icefalcon closed his eyes in momentary pained annoyance. "So you know our tongue." Vair stepped close to the bound man, his white cloak falling over the bulging, straining arms. "Your kin were fools to attack. As they shall learn."

From his belt he unhooked his whip and slashed Loses His Way hard across the face. The warrior stared up at him with blazing azure eyes and, unable to spit in the face of the man standing above him, spit instead at his groin.

Vair's mouth worked once, sharply. Without another word he began to beat the bound man before him, lashing at his face and shoulders with the whip until blood ran down into the tawny beard, then, when the whip would not cut through the tough hide and fur of Loses His Way's clothing, kicking him hard and systematically in the belly and back. Neither man made a sound.

When Vair was finished and stepped back, trying not to pant, Loses His Way raised his gory head and through the broken stumps of his front teeth, spat at him again. It was blood this time.

Vair's voice was shaking with anger. "My Truth-Finder Shakas Kar," he said, "will give you far more time than you will wish to regret that."

As he turned to go Loses His Way spat once more, the red gobbet striking the hem of the snowy cloak.

Bektis and the clones departed in their lord's wake, the clones with their arms full of clothing and weaponry.

"He is a fool." The Icefalcon looked down at the big man lying, panting, his cheek in the puddle of his blood. "But at least this matter diverted Bektis from looking at me, whom, beard or no beard, he would probably have known."

He looked down again at his own body, naked now like the others. Would he die, he wondered, in the cold? "And he might have seen the Runes of Ward on my face. It certainly kept any man present in such fear of speaking that no one remarked that I had no wound. Come."

He took her by the hand again and led the way into the corridor and down to the cell where the clones were dumping coats, shirts, long strips of rawhide binding, and the rag stuffing they wore beneath for warmth.

The cell's door had long since crumbled, so they stationed another guard before it, another clone. But while the men were still unburdening themselves the slender scout Crested Egret strode down the corridor, all his creamy braids fluttering like pennons, and called out "My Lord! My Lord, the boy has escaped!"

Vair swung around, and his gold eyes seemed to pale in the glow of Bektis' witchlight, to pale and grow smaller, like an animal's that is about to attack. "And how is this?" he asked.

"My Lord, the man on guard doesn't know. He's one of the Ti Mens; he says he's been sitting there the whole time."

Vair's teeth showed white where his lips pulled back from them: "Does he now? Maybe Shakas Kar can jog his memory a little."

The Icefalcon personally couldn't imagine torturing a man so obviously incapable of remembering information, a man moreover who hadn't the smallest benefit to gain from helping the prisoner escape.

Bektis, Crested Egret, and at least two of the nonclone warriors present all thought so, too, for there was a general intake of breath...

And a general exhalation the next moment, words unsaid.

Ti Men the guard, the Icefalcon gathered, was in for a very bad few hours.

"Bektis..."

"I shall begin scrying immediately, my Lord." Bektis almost dropped to his belly in his haste to anticipate Vair's demand. "At once. But I beg you to remember, there are chambers in this fortress that were wrought to be proof against magic, proof against scrying as well."

Men were already hastening away to the search, Crested Egret summoning the guard from the weapons cell, explaining-in careful detail and words of one syllable-to the remaining clone on guard that he now had to watch both doors.

"And can you find these chambers?"

"Of course, my Lord. Of course." Bektis would have made the same prompt and affirmative reply, thought the Icefalcon, had the question involved eating the moon with a cheese-fork.

He hastened away with as much dignity as a man can retain when on the verge of breaking into a panic run; the Icefalcon did not blame him. Nearly everyone else had fled. Vair turned to follow; one last clone warrior emerged from the storage cell, handsome young face creased in puzzlement, clearly oblivious to all that had passed in the corridor.

He held out to Vair something that caught the torchlight in a spangle of black and green: a child's velvet slipper, sewn with emeralds. Too small to be Tir's or anything like Tir's. The very workmanship was strange, a remnant of some forgotten world.

"It was in there," said the clone, pointing back into the cell. "In the middle of the floor."

Vair turned it over in his gloved fingers, staring at it for some time with his strange golden eyes. Then he threw it aside and strode down the corridor. The clone picked it up and followed, still holding the pretty thing in his hand.

Only the single clone guard remained, outside the door of the vat-room. A flame of demon-light whisked around the corner, out of sight. Far off the Icefalcon heard, or thought he head, a muffled voice whispering words that he could not quite make out.

"We'd best work fast," said Hethya. "We're aye and far off up on the second level, and the boy's been a good little scout about not leaving tracks, but we can't push our luck too far. What's your plan?"

"I think I can get this man to go to the latrine around that corner there and take off his weapons and his clothing."

"As you did with the poor sod that was on guard over me and Tir?" She shrugged. "Sure and I've known men who did stupider, under the impression it would please God or their fathers."

She followed him around the corner to the dark latrines, one of the few on this level not entirely choked with boscage. "Should be easy enough to hide here. You might look up where they're keeping the food and get those guards to wander off as well. Or have 'em carry it up and leave it somewhere on the second level, on silver trays and with a bit of wine and perhaps a couple of dancin' boys into the bargain."

She winked at him; the Icefalcon merely looked coldly down his nose at her and led her back toward the dark stairs, the foliose tunnels of frost and darkness. "It's hard on the child," she said after a time of climbing stairs in silence. "He's brave as a little soldier, but now and then I see in his eyes somethin' that makes me fear he'll never trust again."

"And whose fault is that?"

"And what good would it have done me to say No, I'II not do it.?" Her autumn eyes turned suddenly hard as glass. "Or to have Bektis open up with that sparkler of his once we were in the Keep and scorch poor Lady Minalde and everybody to a whickerin' crisp, and me with 'em, if I'd said a word wrong during that meeting? Me mother always said to me, 'Wait and watch. No matter what they do to you, if you're living you can still do somethin' farther on down the road.' Which you'll have to admit you can't do if you're dead, me bonnie barbarian. And neither the boy nor his mother were kith nor kin of mine."

The Icefalcon opened his mouth to reply but closed it again. By the lights of the Talking Stars People, Hethya spoke the truth. Noon would have advised him so as well. At length he said, more quietly than he had intended to respond, "What you say is true. But I think that, far up the road, that may be what Bektis believed as well. One must know when one has gone down a road far enough."

Tir sat awake in the double cell on the second level front, at the top of its hidden stair. They'd dispensed with the lamp to save oil, kindling instead a small fire of broken-off vines and dry moss and the shards of the decayed wooden doors.

Hethya lay asleep, muffled in quilted coats-in her dream-shape she wore the bodice and petticoat and a sort of rough jacket that she'd had on in her dreams of Prandtlays Keep.

The Icefalcon watched as her form faded from sight at his side and her eyelids stirred on her body of flesh. There was a change in the texture of the air as her dreams melted into the reality of the Keep.

"Will you be well here by yourself?" she asked Tir, after she'd explained to him what the Icefalcon had said and what she had to do. "Old Vair's got men out searching, but half of them are clones, and once he splits up a man into all those parts it's like he's divided the poor soul's brain among 'em as well as his spirit. I doubt they'll find you here. You're not afraid, are you?"

Tir shook his head, though his eyes seemed huge, haunted in the tiny face.

Seeing in them the lie, Hethya knelt beside him and took him in her arms. "It'll be all right, sweeting."

"I know," he whispered. "It's safe here."

"'Course it is," she said. "'Course it is. Vair couldn't find this place in a year of market days."

Tir relaxed a little and nodded. Hethya touched the wick of the lamp with a spill from the fire and made sure that there was enough wood to last for a time and that the light of the little blaze could not be seen from the corridors.

But-by the way the boy looked around him as Hethya and the Icefalcon, visible and invisible, left the chamber, the Icefalcon had the sudden, irrational impression that it was not Vair whose coming Tir most dreaded.

I did this before. The pain did not kill me.

The Icefalcon stood for a long time in front of the clone in the corridor, gazing into the man's dulled eyes.

Memory of agony. The only dream he had, played over and over: skin flaying off, blood bursting the flesh ...

I did this before.

He felt shredded, ice-cold and ill. The thought of dropping again into the mind of a clone turned him sick.

And what would be so bad about dying anyway? At least the man wasn't possessed by a demon.

He waited until the man's eyes glazed with inattention, then stepped close, across the wall of dreams.

He could barely get the words out, drowning in pain doubled and redoubled to the screaming abysses at the core of the world: "Vair wants you to go to the latrine, take off all your clothing and your weapons, and walk away down the corridor beyond as far as you can, then stop."

He ripped himself free, lay shuddering on the floor, cold to his bones and gasping...

And the clone waked, blinked, and looked around him, frowning. Then he shook his head and settled back against the wall.

He would be one of the brighter ones. Or maybe he'd paid attention to what they did to Ti Men.

Had he had a sword of steel instead of shadow, the Icefalcon would have lopped his head off from sheer pique. Had he had a sword of steel instead of shadow, he reminded himself, he would not be having this problem.

Hethya would be in place beside the latrines, waiting. How often did they change the guards? How often did an officer come and check on them? Especially now, with Tir missing?

It was like waiting for the bison to go back to grazing, like waiting for the wind to shift so you could inch closer to a drinking deer. The Icefalcon had hunted injured, had lain for hours hungry and cold, motionless to surprise prey. This twisting, screaming ache within him wasn't much worse than that, he told himself.

Only waiting, as a hunter waits. The clone's attention drifted.

The Icefalcon wondered if he could alter what he looked like in the man's half dream.

To look, for instance, like Crested Egret.

One hunted raccoons by making a noise like a raccoon.

"Vair wants you to walk to the latrine, take off your clothes and your weapons, and walk away into the corridor beyond."

For a terrifying moment, confused by agony and shock, having made himself look like Crested Egret, the Icefalcon could not remember what he looked like himself. His mind groped, fumbling for a memory, any memory...

Demons shrieked somewhere near, cold fire pouncing.

He writhed out of the way, calling to mind Cold Death's voice and his own recollection of the person who heard her, who was her brother. There were demons all around him, grabbing at his thoughts, tearing and slicing at him with pain and confusion.

He thrust them away, but the pain remained, wounds opening and closing in his phantom body: spent, bleeding, trying desperately to breathe. Terrified with a sense of how close he had come to death.

And the clone was walking away toward the latrine.

The Icefalcon followed shakily, first on his hands and knees, though he got to his feet in a few yards-not that Hethya could see him, of course. He watched from the darkness as the man obediently disarmed and undressed and wandered naked into the blackness and jungles of the farther corridors.

Hethya was out of the side passage and pulling on the man's sheepskin coat almost before the clone had turned the next corner, fumbling in her haste to wrap the rawhide on over her own boots, wadding her disheveled auburn braids up under the fleece cap.

"Whatever else can be said of you, me lanky boy," she addressed the air around her, "you're a damn good dream-speaker." She strode back along the corridor, clumsy in her borrowed gear, to the barred door, shoved the latch aside.

"I hope to meet you face-to-face when you're not a corpse or a ghost... There."

She snatched up the guard's abandoned torch, blew out her lamp again, stepped through into the triple cell, and made a face a little at the growing odor of rot. The torch's light ran redly over the curves of glass and gold, slick and cold on the quicksilver lining of the vat.

The needles on their table grinned, demon teeth. Loses His Way, panting like a trussed bull, half rolled up onto one shoulder, squinted at the light, defiance still in his swollen eyes. Near him the Icefalcon's body lay pale among the darkening corpses, long braids like age-bleached serpents with their rawhide thongs and tangled bones.

"He's all yours, me hearty." Hethya stood aside from the door. The Icefalcon stepped forward, reached down to touch his own face, his own hands...

And felt nothing.

It was a stranger's body.

The face was his; his the blood moving slow as a winter stream in the veins. Bones, muscle, sinew... But it was as if he could no longer remember the language he had spoken as a child. Could not recall the route to a valley he had visited at the farthest edge of his memory.

The terror was like a blow over the heart.

"Come on." Hethya glanced over her shoulder at the open door, stuck the torch in a wall sconce, and crouched to slap the still face. "Wake up, boy-o, there's a good lad. Open your eyes, curse your lizard-eating heart..."

"He is dead," Loses His Way mumbled through puffed purple lips. "A shaman cursed him to his death, cursed his flesh and everything it touches..."

"That's not the story his ghost told me in me dreams, handsome." Loses His Way's blue eyes flared, caught between astonishment, hope, and suspicion; Hethya was already cutting the cord that stretched down his back, fumbling in the guard's coat pockets for the key to the spancels.

"He says he'll be able to get back into his body, not that I think he can do it without a good dollop of witchery for a shoehorn. Me mother was always on about idiots thinkin' there wasn't a thing to magic but sayin' the words of a spell."

She pulled the chains away and thrust her shoulder under that of Loses His Way as the warrior tried to rise and stumbled, limbs cramped and feeble from the binding and the beating he had undergone. "Can you help me get him out of here?"

"Where?"

Remind me never to put you in charge of my horses, thought the Icefalcon in disgust. You'd trust a demon who pointed out a waterhole. Loses His Way tried to pick up the Icefalcon's limp body and staggered, dropping it to the floor Thank you very much. When I get back into my bones, I'll find half of them broken.

"I'll take him-no, I know how to carry a man. Next room along, gather as much of the clothes and gear as you can, boy-o-you know how to get in touch with this sister of his? This shaman that served him his eviction to begin with?"

Loses His Way shook his head. "She fought this Wise One Bektis and his gem of lightning but was driven back, burned by his fires; hurt, I think."

Hethya cursed and manhandled the Icefalcon's body up across her shoulders. "Well, we'll just have to do what we can. There's no chance he's off waitin' elsewhere for us, is there?"

"Were it me, I would not."

They stepped into the corridor, Hethya watching nervously in both directions while Loses His Way gathered up clothing from the other room, then made their way swiftly down the first crossing passage that would take them out of the general area, shadows lurching in the torchlight in their wake.

The Icefalcon was filled with a kind of fascinated dread at the sight of his own face cold and slack against Hethya's shoulder, his own braids dangling down, the scarred arms and calves loose and lifeless. Twice he came near, reaching into the flesh, and twice stepped back, defeated, alien, and desperately frightened.

Like a ghost he could only follow, in the shadows behind the torch's light.

The old man was there.

Huddled beside the bead of lamplight, Tir felt him, out there in the corridor, waiting.

The room was safe. It had been spelled against the scrying of wizards, and the spells held true against other things as well.

But he was there.

Closing his eyes, Tir looked down into memories, as if looking into a well, though whether they were his own or the old man's he didn't really know.

The long-haired warrior, the man that other boy had called "Father," stood before the chair where the old man sat. They were back in the chambers with the crystal pillars: the third chamber, which came right before the fourth one that was so shallow it was barely a niche.

The old man he had seen in his visions of the caravan train, the old man who had been one of those to set out the flares against the Dark Ones. The magelight feather above the aged wizard's head gleamed on the blue patterns of his scalp, the heavy overhang of his tall brow, the questing jut of nose. He looked up, and Tir could not see other than shadow in the sockets of his eyes.

Gently, Tir's father said, "It's time, Zay." Zay made no reply.

Tir's father licked his lips. "We can't wait any longer." His long hair was dressed up in a comb, black with garnets that glinted like droplets of blood.

"No." The old man's mouth formed the words, but there was no sound to them. His sigh, though not great, was louder, like the tearing loose of the soul from its moorings in flesh. "Just... till morning comes.

Please."

"We'll take the road in the morning," said Tit's father, and Zay looked up at him more sharply, hearing something in his words beyond what he said.

"There is no other way," the long-haired warrior went on. "As long as we know so little of the magic of the Dark Ones, we cannot risk-we dare not risk-using the shorter path. LeCiabbeth..." He hesitated over the name. "Ciabbeth did not come?"

Zay shook his head again, and his voice was only a fragment, a splinter of bleached glass. "No."

There was long silence. Then the long-haired man said, "I'm sorry. Truly, truly, I am sorry, Zay. But there can be no more delay. Too many lives depend on it, not only the lives of those here now, but their children, and their grandchildren-all the generations of humankind who will shelter within these walls.

They will thank you, and bless your name."

The old man nodded. "And that," he murmured, "will make it better, I suppose?"

Tir's father said, "If I could do it, Zay, I would."

Zay looked up into his face, bitter, weary beyond words-Tir didn't think he'd ever seen such wormwood wryness in human eyes. "Yes," said Zay softly. "I believe you would, Dare." He got to his feet, straightened his dark robes around him, his hands fumbling. "Ciabbeth..."

"When she comes," said Dare softly, "she will thank you, too." Tir shivered as the men walked away between the crystal pillars. The cold seemed to grow on him, the cold of memory in that place, and it seemed to him that he heard someone's voice whispering, She never came. She never came. She never came.

The whispers seemed to echo from the dark beyond the room where he now sat, the impacted blackness that not even the fire's tiny light could dissipate. It seemed to him that cold flowed in from that blackness, a cold worse than the bitter chill of the frost-stricken chambers, a living cold, malicious and vile.

Footfalls that weren't really footfalls. Bitter hatred, wormwood resentment.

She never came.

A badness deep and rotted, a badness that collected in pockets in the turnings of corridors, the neat cells that no one had lived in long enough to make their homes, in the black well at the heart of the crypts that Tir knew plunged down eternally into darkness.

Fickle, wretched, cowardly whiners... The resentment was a stench imbued deep within the stone.

Ingrates. Cowards and ingrates.

From the corridor came, with the cold, a thread of whistling, a half-identifiable tune.

He'd heard that tune. He knew it.

Was it a tune? Sometimes it sounded like an old man's voice, whispering in the nightmare blackness.

Names, Tir thought. Sometimes, in those bad places that he hurried Hethya through, he could hear that hoarse, muttering voice telling over names in the dark.

He didn't think Hethya could hear. It terrified him because he knew those names. He could see their faces in his mind and knew what had happened to them. Could see the things they wore-a child's black shoes sewn with green gems, a woman's fan, things they'd left behind.

And above everything else, the anger that soaked every stone, every wisp of lichen, every vine and mushroom as poison soaks a sponge, imbuing its every fragment. Anger and resentment and hate. And magic that lived on.