Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 21

There were five levels of the crypts below the ground, even as there were five levels above, and Tir and the Icefalcon followed the vines inward to the Keep's heart. In places vines lay like combed hair, wrist-thick, calf-thick, thigh-thick along the base of the walls, under ceilings where molds moved and murmured to themselves and dripped blood on warrior and child as they passed below.

It was as if the plants that had once been cultivated in the hydroponics crypts had gone mad when the Keep went mad, growing and growing in the blackness and bringing forth nightmare fruit of shapes unseen in the sane or waking world.

In the vines, in the fungus, in the frost-locked chambers where no footfall marred the white glittering surfaces of the floors, apports appeared and disappeared: a man's boot.

A hair ribbon wound around a stem of wild roses, the blossoms still fresh. A scroll of strange gold letters.

A cooking pot wrought of metal the Icefalcon had never seen. Somewhere water gurgled, and in its voice the Icefalcon heard the mutter of names.

Demons kept putting out their torches and picked and tore at the Icefalcon's hands and face and hair while he patiently rekindled sparks in tufts pulled from the desiccated moss. After having his spirit body gutted, torn, dismembered by demons for endless hours, these efforts at distraction did not impress him.

There was a sixth level, below the crypts and the subcrypts, at the bottom of the lowermost stair. Nitre gleamed blue on the rock walls, and the air was frozen with a crushed eternity beneath the ice.

Tir led the way silently, tracing memories of some ancient and unimaginable errand, and the Icefalcon trod silently after him, his hand near his sword-hilt but knowing in his heart that there was nothing there a sword could stay.

At the bottom of an endless stair lay only a cavern lit by the phosphor-glow of nitre and lichens, and in that cavern a pit that fell away to nothing. Wind roared there, and water, too, the Icefalcon thought, and the vines that had lain along the wall the whole of the final stairway spread out and hung over the pit's edge, gray and dry and dead.

A bronze ball floated suspended in the pit, almost below the reach of the wind-snatched torchlight. The bronze had been cracked, perhaps with age; stained and green and falling to pieces, but the magic that had been in it endured. It was just large enough to contain a man.

"Altir, my dear boy." Ingold had managed to hook one elbow over the edge of a great crack in the bronze ball's top and haul himself up from within it. His face was scratched, and there was blood in his hair, demon-lights floated around the ball, and the Icefalcon could half see their plasmic shapes crawling over the curving surface-but his voice was cheerful.

"And the Icefalcon, too. You have no idea how pleased I am to see you both."

"I can guess." The Icefalcon hunkered down at the pit's edge, warily, because demons would probably consider it the ultimate in hilarity to grab his ankles. "Have you made tea?"

Ingold got his other elbow up and rested his chin on his crossed wrists. His hands were in bloody shreds.

He must, the Icefalcon thought, be using all his magic to keep the ball from falling into the pit. "You know, I intended to," said the wizard apologetically, "but the stove in here won't light and the only tea I have with me is a second-rate Round Sea red, which I know you don't drink."

Eyes wide, Tir whispered to the Icefalcon, "There isn't really a stove in that ball, is there?" and the Icefalcon shook his head. "I didn't think so. There used to be chains here. They sometimes hung prisoners over the pit with them."

"Nice people," commented the Icefalcon, standing and handing Tir the torch. The boy was trembling with weariness-as was the Icefalcon himself-but there was no need to tell him to be careful.

They'd all been walking around knee-deep in tinder for days, and even at the Keep of Dare, where the black stone of the walls would not burn, children were taught from earliest childhood to be extremely careful with open flame.

As he moved cautiously along the wall, probing with the sword tip under the debris of muck and dead vines, he called out, "Any particular material or link size of chain you wish?"

"Well, you know," replied the wizard judiciously, "when I'm in danger of being dashed to pieces I generally prefer to be rescued with a fifty-fifty alloy of bronze and silver, oval links rather than square, and no longer than two inches, but since I've been here for some hours I'll settle for anything you find."

He turned sharply and gestured with one hand as lightning sparked from the wall of the pit. The white glare showed up the lines of exhaustion gouged in his face and the grim fear in his eyes.

The forked spear veered aside inches from him, but as it did the bronze ball dropped several yards, then caught itself, almost dislodging Ingold in the process, and slowly rose once more, like a blown-up bladder.

"It is not a good thing," said the Icefalcon, digging cautiously under the leaves with his left hand, "to let down your standards."

Dead tendrils of vines clung to the chain like black wires as he pulled it free, the metal clinking softly. His muscles ached to his back teeth with the effort of dragging it to the edge of the pit.

"I won't tell anyone if you won't."

"Is there a post or a ring in the floor that we can fix this to?" asked the Icefalcon, looking down at Tir.

The boy looked terrified as well as beaten with fatigue, but the silly banter of the adults-which Ingold and the Icefalcon had been trading since their first meeting on the training floor at Gae-seemed to calm him.

He thought a moment and went to show the Icefalcon the place; when they came back the chain was gone.

"It's heavy," consoled Ingold, in response to the Icefalcon's remarks. "It probably wasn't apported very far."

The Icefalcon hated Zay with a great, weary hatred.

They found another chain-not the same one-buried under moss, and the Icefalcon kept hold of it this time, wrapping and knotting it through one of the rings in the floor.

He wasn't sure whether the chain would reach, but he wasn't about to trust knotting it to the vines. More lightning burst and flared from the sides of the pit, drawn to the ball by the magic Ingold was putting out to hold it aloft; the effort of turning it aside made the ball itself pitch and dip nearly twenty feet.

"Rudy says levitation's just about one of the hardest magics to do," whispered Tir worriedly. Wind had begun to rise, swirling up out of the pit. The creepers underfoot twitched with a dreadful serpentine life.

"So I have heard, too." The Icefalcon dragged the chain to the lip of the pit, gathered loops of it in his hand, gauged the distance to the ball. "Can you bring that thing up a little?"

"I'll try." Ingold inched himself up gingerly onto the top curve of the broken ball. Wind caught in his long white hair, his tattered robes. "I thought you pitched thirteen innings against Lord Ankres' guards last summer for the championship."

"I was pitching a baseball, not a chain."

Rudy had been responsible for the Keep baseball league-it was Ingold who'd slugged in the winning run.

The Icefalcon had held out for weeks against participation in what he haughtily referred to as a "silly child's game," until Gnift the Swordmaster had informed all Guards that they would participate-he needed a winning team against Lord Ankres. The Icefalcon had been the star pitcher ever since.

The chain fell short five times, lightning searing and slicing its way up the length of it as it dropped down against the side of the pit. The sixth time Ingold caught it, levin-fire sizzling as the old man's bleeding hands wrapped around the links; the spells to turn it aside released the bronze ball from its suspension and it dropped from beneath him.

Ingold swung in a long pendulum swoop and fell, hard, against the side of the pit, clinging there with demons dragging at his ankles and the freezing wind raking him. Tir screamed, "Ingold!" in terror.

"I'm all right," came Ingold's voice, half drowned in the spectral howling. "I'm all right."

Beside the Icefalcon, Tir was white as a ghost; the Icefalcon pretended not to see and called down, "I know you're all right, old man, but don't hurt the chain. It's expensive."

It was very seldom that the Icefalcon-or anyone-could make Ingold laugh out loud, but that one succeeded. His laughter came ringing up out of the lightning-slashed maelstrom of the pit, followed by a soldier's epithet. The metal clanged softly against the stone as the wizard started to climb.

Wind redoubled around them in fury, ripping at the torch flames and nearly rocking the torch from Tir's hand. The Icefalcon staggered, caught the vines at the pit's edge for balance, and then pulled his bloodied hand back with a curse. Driven leaves slashed their faces, blinding them, colder and colder...

Then the wind abruptly ceased. In the stillness that followed, mist began to rise from the vines underfoot, from the fungus clumped along the walls, from the pit itself.

The Icefalcon spun, rising to his feet, sword in hand, heart hammering. "Get back from the edge of the pit, Tir," he said softly. "But don't go far from me. Old man, get up here."

In response there was only the zapping hiss of lightning below.

"Get up here!"

A shadow in the mist, forming slowly. Stringers of white hair and glabrous flesh peeking through holes in black rags; the glint of crystals... The Hand of Harilomne? The smell of him, thick as the reek of a privy years uncleaned. The shadow opened its mouth, but all that came out was a hiss.

The Icefalcon didn't dare take his eyes off him to see where Ingold might be. He heard the chain clank again, and the chill flare of lightning illuminated from below the mists that now filled the pit.

Gil had told him once that the best bet when confronted by an angry wizard was to get him talking; the Icefalcon, no conversationalist, groped madly in his mind for something to say, something to hold this spirit of insane power distracted until Ingold could arrive.

"As you see," he said, "we have not escaped you after all."

Zay's head turned. The eyes that regarded him were white pits of mindless rage.

"I wonder that you will let those others depart, the black generalissimo and the men he makes from mushrooms and filth. He does not regard you, does not even know your name."

The old face, wrinkled beyond humanity, did not alter its expression, but the mouth opened a little, showing the brown broken stumps of teeth, and he hissed again.

Then the chain clanked, and Zay's hand flashed up with reflexes a young warrior would have envied, and fire roared across the dry carpet of the floor like a drench of water hurled from a basin.

The Icefalcon grabbed Tir and dove for the half of the floor uncovered by vines, striking the rock hard and rolling. There was a clashing of chain and then Ingold's voice crying out words of ward and protection and the roll of oily heat.

Looking back, in the flaring crimson light the Icefalcon saw Ingold, standing on the lip of the pit, wreathed in fire and smoke, and before him himself: senile, filthy, reeking, drool dribbling from a toothless mouth, blue eyes blind and wandering, but the face his own.

Flame swirled in columns from the floor again, and Tir screamed in pain: spots and threads of fire burst to life all along Tir's arm, across the Icefalcon's shoulders and thighs, then quenched suddenly with the lifting of Ingold's hand.

The flames shrank to fingerlets in the vines, died to a bed of throbbing coals, though blazes continued to gutter and flicker all around the room's walls, and smoke filled the air.

A woman now stood before Ingold. Gil-Shalos, sluttish and loosemouthed and obscene.

"Zay," Ingold said patiently, though he was panting with exertion and sweat streaked his soot-grimed, blistered face. "It is you that I wish to see." He stood perilously near the edge of the pit, driven back by the flames, holding up his hand to shield his eyes.

He's holding Zay's attention, thought the Icefalcon. Holding him so I can get Tir out of here.

Looked at logically, what good that would do if Ingold were killed he couldn't imagine.

Still he calculated the route, not a good one-past Zay, along the wall where the fires still smoked and sputtered, up the stairs... Wind roared up out of the pit again, slashing at Ingold's beggarly rags, almost rocking him from his feet.

Sleet mixed with it, chips of rock, dead leaves, sparks, and stinging insects. The Icefalcon pressed Tir's face to his chest and bent down his head, blind, frozen, waiting to get the strength, to find the moment, to flee.

Trapped by the vines in the corridor outside Tir's hiding place, he had felt the power of the Keep: the cold, the icy wind, and the water that had poured down over him from the broken pipes had sapped most of his strength.

Zay's strength was endless, the strength of madness, night, cold, rage.

And in the end, flight would do no good. Keep him talking, Gil had said.

The wind increased, blackness at the world's end. The hate of three thousand years in solitary hell.

Cyclone fury that would shred flesh from bone. The Icefalcon closed his fingers hard around the vines of the floor to keep from being blown into the pit and pressed Tir to him until he thought their bones would lock.

Stillness fell. An angry whisper among the vines. The Icefalcon was aware his hands were bleeding.

In the cold black darkness images flooded into the Icefalcon's mind: the Dark Ones surrounding a camp in open country, the Keep of the Shadow looming tall and cold above a valley where three springs glinted diamond-bright in gray rock.

A wolf surprised where it fished in one of those springs. The white hard moon ringed in ice and ringed again with the huge frost-flashes of moon dogs halfway across the sky.

Men and women packing, loading food and clothing into hampers and bins. A girl in her teens pressed back against a corridor wall in the Keep, a basket of laundry in her arms and her hand clamped tight to her mouth as pale-blue lights ran along the wall into darkness. Knockings in the night.

A child crying as her bedclothes caught fire.

They had left because he had begun, slowly, to go mad. The Icefalcon suddenly understood why.

Smoke and mist funneled down on Ingold again, a black whirlwind like a dust devil through whose ragged fringes lightning flared blue and deadly. Wind and lightning drove him to the edge of the pit, wind and lightning and concentrated malice, blinding and tearing and cold.

Now was the time-Zay's mind centered on destroying the rival mage-Noon or any other of the people of the Real World would have told him to flee. But instead the Icefalcon stood up and shouted, "Zay!" at the top of his soft voice.

The howl of fire and darkness, smoke and nightmare, drowned his words.

"Zay," he cried again, pitching his throat to the cutting edge of flint, "Zay, she tried to come! Le-Ciabbeth tried to come to you!"

He hoped to his Ancestors-not that they were ever very helpful-that he had the name right.

The smoke and lightning died. The whirlwind grew still. A leaf skittered, came to rest among the dead snakeskins of the vines. Ingold, driven to his knees on the pit's edge, looked up in considerable surprise but had the good sense to say nothing.

Stillness filled the room, stillness and darkness broken only by the flickerings of the fires in the corners, the malign whisper of lightning deep in the pit.

Anger.

He felt as he felt in the summer hunting on the plains, when the sky turned green and hail slashed sideways over the grass and the long yellow-brown funnels of the cyclones began to finger silently from the clouds.

Anger black and aching and filled with loneliness.

Not one of them remembered. Not one of them remained. She did not come.

The Icefalcon tried to assemble in his mind what Gil-Shalos would have made of the story, how she would have threaded together the half-guessed clues of Tir's dreams, of the apports, of Vair's and Bektis' words and things Hethya had told him or Loses His Way.

"Le-Ciabbeth tried to come to you, Zay," he said slowly, as before him the shape grew into being again, solidifying with a horrible gradualness from shadow and darkness and the choking smolder of the fires in the room.

"When the transporter, the Far-Walker, would not work, she tried to come overland. She died in the badlands, far to the south of here."

The weight of the anger focused, mad but calm. Conscious as he had never been in his life of his naked helplessness, the Icefalcon reflected that the problem about keeping a wizard talking to you was that you called yourself to his attention, and there was very little use in being a perfect warrior if one was going to be so stupid as to do what he was doing now.

The whispering was within his mind, but he knew it came from the sick-gleaming silver speck of a moist eye, peering at him out of shadow.

How did she die, barbarian? How do you know this? Gil would ask, Was she a mage or not a mage? It was important to the telling of the tale.

Also, the Icefalcon reflected, to his continued survival. After this he would stick to the truth. It was easier. He thought about tracks and trails long left cold. "I do not know this, Ancestor of wizards," he said. "My people found her bones in a stream cut on the hill that lies three days' walk west of the great pass of Renweth; her bones, and her jewels, green as spring leaves with hearts black as summer night, jewels such as none of us had ever seen. These we buried with her bones..." Did the Ancestors of the Times Before bury their dead? Why hadn't he ever asked Gil that? He didn't know why, but something made him add, "At the far end of a box canyon, near a stream, where the wild roses first show themselves in spring." And he saw the place again in his heart. Long stillness, slowly deepening-they can find rest in some image, Hethya had said, until they can think clearer and find a way through.

There was a sort of whisper in the darkness, a little sound, Ah... The stillness spread like the ripples of a pond, to all the corners of the Keep. The Icefalcon said-for himself, for the Dove, and for that vanished lady-"Forgive her that she failed." She never came. She never came.

But now there was only deep sadness in the thought, and that deepening calm, as if the whole Keep might slide over into sleep and dreaming.

The Icefalcon saw again those years in the Keep of the Shadow, the knockings in the darkness growing louder and more angry, the unexplained little fires, the things falling down, disappearing, moving. The madness that was Zay's only refuge from regret.

"You waited a long time for her, Zay," came Ingold's voice, gentle out of the darkness, like the voices heard in one's mind in dreams. "No one could blame you for your anger. But now it is she who waits for you.

Black rage swelled again, suffocating; the air lambent with fire. The chain where it hung down the side of the pit jerked and rattled, and for an instant the smoke collecting ever thicker above their heads bellied and dipped, whirlwinds reaching down. Then that silence again, and stillness, as Zay let his anger go. I don't know the way out.

"I do," The mage's deep, flawed voice was genuinely sad. "And I will show you." The Icefalcon wasn't sure then what he saw-but then one wasn't, dealing with the Wise. He thought Ingold made a gesture with one hand, sketching lines of light that stretched out from his fingers, past where the wall had to be, into zones of the air that glittered as if jeweled. He thought he saw stars, but they were deep in the earth and that was impossible.

The lines were already fading when a voice said, far away, Thank you. Darkness streamed back, darkness heavy and breathless, darkness without relief-darkness dead, at rest after three thousand years of madness and pain. From the last flicker of light the voice whispered, Repay? Ingold started to shake his head and to lift his hand in benediction, when the Icefalcon spoke up again. "As a matter of fact," he said, "there is one last thing you can do for us."

"I have never in my life," whispered Ingold, as he and the Icefalcon, with Tir scurrying between them, strode up the dark stairs to the Keep of the Shadow above, "heard such a farrago..."

"Don't give me that, old man. I've heard worse from you in drinking games with the Guards." He wiped a trickle of blood off his forehead.

"And you're making a lot of assumptions about what everyone is able to do in that scheme of yours."

Ingold was digging around in his various satchels and pockets for something to bandage his hands.

"Particularly me."

The Icefalcon raised his eyebrows. "Are you not the greatest wizard and swordsman in the West of the world?"

"What, out of twenty-five survivors? There's an honor for you. And given the fact that..."

Ingold stopped short on the stairs, looking upward, and the Icefalcon, following his gaze, felt a sinking dread.

Red light smote their faces as they rounded the curve of the stair, a crimson glare that illuminated from below the billows of smoke that drifted in the dead black air. Heat condensed in the narrow spaceheat and the soft far-off roaring, like the beat of the sea.

The Icefalcon whispered, "Damn."

Ingold nodded. "Damn indeed." There was no need for further words between them: they both knew what had happened.

The fires started by Zay in his battle with Ingold had spread. The Keep of the Shadow was burning.