Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 4

Eleven years previously, the Icefalcon had departed from the Talking Stars People, under circumstances which, if they did not absolutely preclude his return, guaranteed a comprehensively unpleasant welcome home.

Because it was unreasonable to suppose that any of those who dwelt in the Real World-the Twisted Hills People, or the Earthsnake People, or those other peoples whom the mud-diggers referred to collectively as the White Raiders-would trust one whose Ancestors had been enemies of their Ancestors, there had really been no place for him to go but across the mountain wall in the east.

As a child he had heard tales of the people of the straight roads, the mud-diggers, the dwellers in the river valleys, though the ranges of the Talking Stars People lay far north of the ragged line of mud digger mines and settlements that stretched from Black Rock among the Bones of God to Dele on the Western Ocean.

Noon and Watches Water had told him the mud-diggers were crazy-which he had found later to be by and large true-and also lazy and stupid about important things, and almost unbelievably unobservant about the world around them.

In the warm lands where water was easy to come by and plants were coaxed in abundance from the earth, there were kings and walls and warriors to protect those who didn't bother to learn to protect themselves. People could afford to be lazy and to make an art of telling fanciful stories about things that had never actually happened, at least for as long as the kings were alive and the walls were standing.

After the coming of the Dark Ones things changed, of course. But in the high summer of his seventeenth year, when the Icefalcon made his way east over the pass that now he traveled west, the Dark Ones had been only one tale among many to the mud-diggers and in places not even that.

In that summer the cover had been better, pale aspens bright among the firs, with brakes of hazel, dogwood, and laurel to conceal him and his horse. He'd moved mostly by twilight since the people of the straight roads kept guards in the pass at that time, fearing quite rightly the depredations of bandit troops from the West. In those days the Raiders had very little use for the mud-diggers' cattle. There had been gazelle and bison, red deer and wild sheep then in the northern plains.

The Keep of Dare was the first structure the Icefalcon beheld on the sunrise side of the mountain wall. It had surprised him, he recalled, and smiled a little at the recollection. The houses of the mud diggers that he had seen before had all been wood structures of two or at most three floors, or in the South, low buildings of adobe roofed with pine poles or tiles. He had not expected the Keep. It was some time before he learned that civilized people on this side of the mountains did not all dwell in great dark solitary fortresses, untouchable by enemies.

Sunrise found him in the thin stands of birch and aspen at the western foot of Sarda Pass. Reaching the place nearly an hour short of first light, he found a spot where chokecherry grew thick around the white boulders that marked the ascending road from the West and, crawling in, rolled himself up in Rudy's mantle and his own blanket to sleep. The snow lay behind him. Clouds piled the gray-and-white western cliffs of Anthir, and bitter wind nipped at him like a Wise One's leftover curse. He hoped Gil would be well.

Squirrel chitter woke him. He had a sling tied around the bottom of his quiver, and it took him nearly two hours to kill four squirrels: spring wary, and spring thin as well, no more than a few mouthfuls each. Still he roasted them and ate everything that wouldn't keep: guts, hearts, brains. He'd need the meat later.

Some of the innards he used as fish bait in the pools of one of the many springs that came down from Anthir's climbing maze of hogbacks and scarps, and the fish he caught he cooked also.

Time-consuming, but he knew himself incapable of rescuing Tir alone if there were a Wise One in the enemy party, and the tracks of Bektis and Hethya weren't going to fly away. He shaved-his beard had not begun when he'd first crossed the mountains and he'd never liked going furry-and tried to bring down one of the raccoons that came to thieve his fish but failed in the endeavor.

The sun was high before he filled his water bottle and Rudy's from the spring and set out on what he already knew would be a long pursuit.

He'd taken three horses when he left the Talking Stars People, Little Dancer, whom he had owned for years, Sand Cat, and Dung For Brains. Sand Cat had been shot under him in a brush with Gettlesand bandits, and Dung For Brains he had killed himself when the animal went lame.

His dog, Bright Feet, had also been killed by the bandits in Gettlesand: the spirit-bag he still wore under his clothing, next to his skin, contained some of Bright Feet's hair.

He found horses corraled near the shining jet walls of the Keep, his first day in Renweth Vale. Stealing two was no difficult matter. These he'd named Brown Girl and Wind.

Then, knowing he was going to live east of the wall for some time, he set himself to observe the mud-diggers who lived in the Vale. It became obvious to him at once that these were a war party of some sort, though he could not determine who their enemy was and where they lay.

They had neither flocks nor herds (except for their horses), nor did they plant fields of the corn, cotton, and beans that grew in the mud-diggers' settlements in the South. They had a few dooic as slaves-the slumped, hairy semihumans that the Talking Stars People would have killed out of hand-but he did not see children among them, or old people, though that could have been accounted for by famine or plague.

The men and women of the Keep, back in that far summer, wore either black clothing marked with a small white four-petaled flower or red with one or three black stars. There was a tall man who wore red much of the time and sported a chain of blue gems around his neck and a long black cloak that spread about him like wings when he walked, and he seemed to be in command of the men and women in red.

It was a day or so before the Icefalcon realized that another man-equally tall but thin, clothed no differently from all the other wearers of black, save that the emblem on his breast was an eagle worked in gold-was commander over them all.

This man was the one they called Eldor, or Lord Eldor, and this was the man who, the Icefalcon realized on his second day in the Vale, was stalking him.

"It only needed that!" stormed Blue jewels on that second day, when the two horses were reported missing. He made a great expansive angry gesture that would have startled game and drawn enemies for miles around, and Eldor folded his long arms and regarded him in self-contained quiet, his head a little on one side.

"Bandits in the Vale! I told you how it would be did you reopen Dare's Keep, Lord Eldor. It dominates all the valley for miles. Instead of expending effort and supplies to make it fit for a larger garrison which I understand, with the depredations of the bandits growing in the West-you would do better to leave it locked and expand the fortifications at the western foot of the pass."

His deep, melodious voice carried easily to where the Icefalcon lay along the limb of the great pine tree that still grew between the Keep and the stream. It was the custom of the Talking Stars People periodically to send warriors south to kidnap men from the settlements, whom they kept as prisoners for a winter to teach the children the tongue of the Wathe.

These men they usually initiated into one or another of the families so that when the time of the spring sacrifices came nobody who had actually been born into the families had to be tortured to death, though the hair of such men usually wasn't long enough to make good bowstrings.

"As sure as the Ice in the North," Blue jewels went on, "if you leave the Keep open, either bandits will take it as a hold or some troublemaker landchief will."

"If it was bandits." The tall Lord Eldor followed the offending sentry back to the horse lines, speaking to Blue jewels as they walked. "Tomec Tirkenson tells me bandits as a rule are too greedy for their own good. They'll lift the whole herd, not two out of the middle where they wouldn't be noticed until the count."

After a little more bluster, Blue Jewels-whom the Icefalcon later knew as Alwir of the House of Bes, one of the wealthiest and most powerful lords of the Realm-ordered out a party of his red-clothed warriors to search the Vale, and the Icefalcon made his leisurely way back to his camp near the standing-stones, to move it before they got there.

He later came to know both Eldor and Alwir well, but it sometimes seemed to him that all the years of acquaintance only deepened, rather than altered, his initial impression of them: Alwir declaiming and jumping to an incorrect conclusion, Eldor standing a little distance from him, withholding judgment, an expression of observation and a detached amusement in his steel-colored eyes.

Winter still held the land below the pass. The Real World that stretched between the Snowy Mountains and the Seaward was an unforgiving land, a land of little water in most places and few trees, a land of hard, steady winds punctuated by summer tornadoes and, so he had heard, of winter ice storms these past ten years that tore man and beast to shreds and froze them where they fell. Herds of bison and antelope wandered the open miles of grassland, and as the winters lengthened and deepened, mammoth, yak, reindeer, and rhinoceri joined them, followed by the great killers: dire wolves, saber-teeth, horrible-birds. Since the Summerless Year slunch had spread, the wrinkled, rubbery, faintly glowing sheets of it swallowing the ground for miles, sucking the life from any plant it engulfed. The slunch in its turn put forth a kind of life, strange creatures that wandered abroad but did not appear to either eat, or seed, or excrete. These things died and rotted with a strange, mild, sweetish stench and left patches of slunch where they lay.

The Icefalcon's hackles raised like a dog's to see how the slunch and the cold had altered the land. Many of the groves that dotted the western foothills were now dead, buried under the whitish masses. As he followed the westward road that first day, the stuff stretched on both sides, in patches or in sheets miles broad, and neither rabbits, nor lemmings, nor antelope moved over the dying grass that lay between. By the debris left where Bektis and his party stopped to rest, the Icefalcon learned that in addition to what Bektis and Hethya had carried on their two donkeys they'd helped themselves to the Keep's stores of dried meat, cheese, and potatoes. With his sling he killed two kites that came down after the cheese rinds and potato parings and added their meat to his satchel, and the rinds and parings as well. With slunch growing abroad in the lands food would be even more difficult to find, and he knew he could waste none. Only in the camps did he see Tir's tracks and guessed by the marks in the thin dust that they were keeping the boy's hands tied.

In a way it was just as well, he thought. Whatever Gil might say, the boy might have tried to escape while the mountains still loomed in the east, and his chances of survival would be nil in these desolate lands.

After black-cloaked Alwir with his blue jewels had declared him to be a bandit, hunting parties went out to search the Vale of Renweth for the Icefalcon for three days running. The Icefalcon had been more amused than anything else, patiently moving his camp every few hours-the invisible camp of the peoples of the North, which left no sign on the land-and watching them.

He watched, too, the trains of mules that came up the gorge of the Arrow River through the smaller range of peaks west of the Vale, food and seed and saplings; watched the training of the black-clothed Guards under the tutelage of a little bald-headed man with a hoarse voice; watched Alwir and Eldor walk around the walls of the Keep and the edges of the woods that surrounded its knoll, talking and making notes on tablets wrought of wood and wax.

Alwir continued to complain of the size of the Keep and its uselessness as a garrison against the Gettlesand bandits. "In times of siege it's a jail!" he declared, striding up and down the shallow steps that led to its single pair of dark metal Doors. "To be sure, no one can get in, but the defenders are trapped!

Unless there's a secret way out? A tunnel for sorties, perhaps, or a hidden door?"

His blue eyes glinted eagerly. He was a man who loved secrets, thought the Icefalcon, lying in the long grass beside the stream. Himself, he would never have entrusted any secret to this Alwir, who seemed to consider himself above the laws of common men by virtue of his descent from the lordly House of Bes.

"None that I know of," replied Eldor calmly and went on with his surveying, knee-deep in the long meadow grass.

This Eldor was a man of thirty-five, as tall as Alwir and just slightly taller than the Icefalcon himself, who at seventeen was an inch or so short of his final growth. Eldor wore his brown hair cut off about his shoulders, as was the fashion of civilized people, and had an air of lean strength. Sometimes he would fight practice bouts with his warriors, either the black-clothed or the red.

Observing them in the light of the fires and torches-which illuminated the whole western face of the Keep and would have made them an easy target for the arrows of any foe on earth-or in the twilight before full dark, the Icefalcon saw with approval the hard stringency of the teaching.

The lithe bald man in charge corrected and explained and shouted criticism as if the combatants were stupid children barely able to bat one another with clubs, or put them through endless drills with weighted weapons that the Icefalcon quickly saw were designed to most quickly and efficiently increase their strength and speed.

It was a method of teaching he had never encountered among his own people, and it fascinated him. He would go down to the camp by the black walls every evening, after the work of planting and clearing had been done and after the stupid patrols had been called in, and he would watch them for hours.

In his own camp he whittled a sword of the length they were using, with a two-handed hilt, balanced differently from the short stabbing-swords used on the plain and made for a different sort of warfare. He practiced everything he had seen the previous night, timing himself against the calls of the night-birds or striking against a tree trunk.

Then he would go back and listen, and heard for the first time the music these people made, with harps and pipes, different from the simple reed flutes of his people, intricate and beautiful if completely useless.

They would also tell tales, of valor and violence and love, and it was some time before he realized that these were made up and had never really happened to anyone. It was an art with them, he learned later-and also among Gil's people, evidently-to make such fictions sound as if they were true. The tales of civilized people were beautiful and fascinated the Icefalcon in spite of himself, but he told himself they were useless.

Then one night the Icefalcon had returned to his camp to find Wind and Little Dancer gone.

That Eldor hadn't taken all three animals, as one would do to an enemy, outraged him. I think you'll need a horse, it implied. That he had left Brown Girl, the worst of the three, was a slap, given teasingly, as a man might slap a boy in jest. And he knew it was Eldor who had taken them. While he was watching the sparring in the evening, he thought, annoyed, as he searched the place the next morning for tracks.

He found them, but it was difficult. The man had covered his traces well. Eldor had distracted him with the large search parties while making solitary reconnaissance of his own.

The Icefalcon guessed they were expecting him to try to steal back Little Dancer, at least, from the cavvy. They always tethered her and Wind in the middle. He noticed the Guards were now more numerous. So he waited and watched, until one evening Eldor rode forth from the Keep alone on Wind, a tall black stallion that the Icefalcon had seen was a favorite of his. He followed him up the meadows to the rising ground above the Keep and shot him in the back with an arrow.

The Icefalcon smiled again, thinking about it now as he made a cold camp in the ditch beside the west-leading road.

Of course Eldor had been wearing armor, steel plate sandwiching a core of cane and overlaid with spells of durability and deflection. If it hadn't been twilight, blue shade filling the long trough of Renweth Vale like a lake of clear dark water, he'd have seen the awkward fit of the man's surcoat or wondered why in summer he'd worn a cloak.

Eldor had carried a pig's bladder of blood, too, and smashed it as he fell from Wind's back, so the Icefalcon smelled blood from where he hid in the trees. He'd thought it sheer bad luck that his victim had fallen on the reins, holding the horse near. The "corpse" had hooked his feet out from under him and put a knife to his throat. The Icefalcon never believed in bad luck again.

"Alwir thinks you're a scout from a bandit gang," Eldor said, without relaxing his grip. "But you're alone, aren't you?"

The Icefalcon said nothing. He supposed if he had to die at least this was better than the fate he left among the Talking Stars People, but his own stupidity filled him with anger.

"I've heard you people don't ride with bandits."

Still nothing. It was true that none of the people of the Real World had much use for bandits, not wanting the possessions that lawless folk so stupidly craved, but it was not the way of his people to speak with enemies.

"I don't want to kill you," said Eldor, though he didn't relax his grip or move the knife. "It would be a waste of a good warrior, and I need good warriors. I saw the practice posts you've made at your camps, to go over for yourself what Gnift has been teaching the Guards lately. Would you like to learn?"

The Icefalcon considered the matter and pointed out, "I am your enemy."

Eldor released him then and got up very quickly, stepping clear even as the Icefalcon rolled to his feet.

"Why?" he asked.

The Icefalcon thought about the reasons that he had left the Talking Stars People and about where he might go, and what he might do, now that it was impossible for him to go back. He found that he did not have any reply to Eldor's question.

Eldor Endorion.

The Icefalcon drank a little water and settled himself in the bayberry that grew in the ditch. The silence of the prairie drifted over him. He listened, identifying the crying of the coyotes and the greater voices of wolves farther off, the susurration of the ceaseless wind and the smell of dust and growing needlegrass.

The world of his childhood reassembling itself, scent by scent and sound by sound in the darkness.

He was home.

Eldor Endorion.

He hadn't been at all surprised to learn that the man who had overpowered him, the man who had put himself in danger in order to trap a possible spy, was in fact the High King of the Wathe. Even when he learned the size of the Realm, and the rich complexity of the world Eldor ruled, he had felt no surprise at the acts.

They were typical of the man.

Eldor remained an extra week in Renweth Vale with the men and women he had sent to regarrison and reprovision the Keep, in order to train with the Icefalcon, to get to know him, to test him as leaders test warriors whom they seek to win to their sides. The Icefalcon had trained hawks. He knew what Eldor was doing.

He never felt toward the King the reverence that the other Guards did or stood in awe of that darkly blazing personality. But he knew the man was trustworthy and respectworthy to the core of his being. He was content to attach himself to the Guards.

He spent four years in the city of Gae, training with the Guards. He exchanged his wolf-hide and mammoth-wool clothing for the fine dense sheep-wool uniforms, black with their white quatrefoil flowers; wore the hard-soled boots of civilized men (though they were less comfortable than moccasins and left more visible tracks). When his beard came in the following year, he shaved, as civilized men did, though he never cut his hair. He learned to use a long killing-sword and to fight in groups rather than alone.

In Gae he met Ingold, Eldor's old tutor, unobtrusively mad and-he quickly learned-probably the finest swordsman in the west of the world. He saw him first sparring on Gnift's training floor and took him for some shabby old swordmaster down on his luck, which was what he invariably looked like. Later, after he trounced the Icefalcon roundly, they'd have long discussions about animal tracks, the habits of bees, and where grass grew.

Just to watch the High King spar with the Wise One was an education. Now and then he would see Alwir's sister about the palace compound, a pretty, quiet schoolgirl who read romances and never left her governess' side and had not a word to say for herself. Three years after his arrival in Gae she was married to Eldor, for the benefit of both their houses. Their child was Tir.

Though no one knew it, time was running out for civilized folk, like water from a cracked jar.

It was during this time, too, that he became acquainted with Bektis, who was much more a fixture at court than Ingold. Ingold was in and out of the city, but Bektis had a suite of chambers in Alwir's palace in the district of the city called the Water Park-less crowded and smelly than the rest of Gae, which had taken the Icefalcon years to get used to.

Bektis scried the future and the past (he said) and learned through magic of things far away, and he also worked the weather for court fetes and advised Alwir about shipping ventures, something that made the Wise Ones mistrusted by merchants and farmers throughout the civilized realms.

Shamans among the Icefalcon's people also worked the weather, insofar as they would avert the worst of the storms from the winter settlements and the horse herds, but such workings were known to be dangerous. Besides, working the weather might let enemies guess where you camped.

Alwir and Bektis referred to the Icefalcon as "Lord Eldor's Tame Barbarian" and made little jests about the things that were, to him, simply logical, like always having weapons and a day's supply of food on his person, keeping to corners and never being where he could not immediately get out of a room. Their jokes did not offend him. Merely they informed him that they were fools, as most of the people of the straight roads were either mad or fools.

And most of them died with the coming of the Dark Ones.

Wind moved over the land, bitterly cold. Above the overcast that veiled the sky most nights now, the waning moon was a ravel of luminous wool. It had taken the Icefalcon most of a year to separate the reflexive terror about being outdoors after nightfall, developed by those who had passed through the Time of the Dark, from the reasonable wariness he had possessed before.

Now he listened, identifying sounds and smells, gauging the scent of greenery and water somewhere beyond the slunch to the northwest that meant he might hunt tomorrow, measuring it against the certainty that there would be predators there as well. A small glowing thing like a detached head on two legs ran by along the top of the ditch-most slunch-born things glowed a little. A night-bird skimmed past, hunting moths.

Tir was out there in the dark, in the camp with Bektis and Hethya and those three identical black warriors.

Eldor's son.

Eldor was not the kin of the Icefalcon's ancestors. By the standards of the Talking Stars People, he would be considered an enemy. But he had not been. And he was the only person in Gae-the only person in all that new life the Icefalcon had lived among civilized people for four years-to whom he had spoken about why he had left the Talking Stars People and why he could not go back.

Speaking to him had made him less of an enemy. But what he would be called, the Icefalcon did not know.

The Dark Ones ringed this place.

Tir forced his eyes open, forced himself to look out past the campfire that seemed to him so pitifully inadequate; forced himself to look out into the darkness.

They aren't really there.

He had never actually seen the Dark Ones. Not that he remembered by himself-his mother had told him they'd all gone away when he was a little baby. Sometimes in nightmares he'd be aware of them, amorphous waiting stirrings in the shadows and a smell that scared him when he smelled things like it sometimes, some of the things the women of the Keep used to clean clothing with.

He saw them now. The memory was overwhelming, like a recollection of something that had happened to him only yesterday: clouds of darkness that blotted the moon, winds that came up suddenly, seeming to blow from every direction at once, carrying on them the wet unnatural cold, the blood and ammonia stink.

On this very stream bank-only the gully wasn't this deep then, and the stream's waters had lain closer to the surface, gurgling and glittering in the light of torches, a ring of torches-he had watched them pour across the flat prairie grass like floodwaters spreading and had felt his heart freeze with sickened horror and the knowledge that there was no escape. They aren't really there.

He faced out into the darkness, and the darkness was still.

The memory retreated a little. He felt weak with shock and relief.

"For the love o' God, Bektis," said Hethya, "let the poor tyke eat." She stood in the firelight, hair dark except where the reflected glare made brassy splinters in it, red mouth turned down with irritation.

Bektis said, "I'm not going to risk the child running away." He was rubbing and polishing the device that he wore over his right hand with a chamois; the great jointed encrustation of crystals and gold locked around his wrist, gemmed the back of his hand and his arm, and the knuckles of two of his fingers, with slabs and nodules of coruscant light.

Polishing meticulously, obsessively, now with the leather and now with one of the several stiff brushes he took from his satchel, as if he feared that a single fleck of grease from dinner-which Hethya had cooked-would lessen its lethal power.

He had killed Rudy with it. Tir shut his eyes.

He had killed Rudy.

When he shut his eyes he could still see his friend, his mother's friend, the man who was the only father he'd known.

Hand lifted, the pronged crescent of the staff he bore flashing light, levin-fire showing up the crooked-nosed face, the wide dark eyes. Working magic, fighting Bektis' spells so that he could rescue him, Tir, get him away from those people who'd somehow made him think that Rudy was with them all the way up the pass, that Rudy was there telling him it was okay to go with them.

He could still see the fake Rudy melting and changing into a black-skinned bald man, a man he'd never seen before, like those two other identical black warriors who'd come out of the woods to follow them toward the pass. Could still feel their hands on him, grabbing him when he tried to jump down from the donkey and run.

Then Rudy had been there, with Gil and the Icefalcon, witchlight showing them up among the rocks and snow and inky shadows of the pass. Rudy running, zigzagging away from the lightning bolts Bektis threw at him, straightening up to hurl fire from the head of his staff, crying out words of power.

The lightning bolt had hit him. And he'd fallen. Tir clamped his teeth hard to keep from crying.

"Here you go, sweeting." He heard the rustle of Hethya's clothes-she'd changed back into trousers and a man's tunic and coat-and smelled the scent of her, thicker and sweeter than a man's. He smelled, too, the roasted meat and the potatoes she carried in a gourd bowl and opened his eyes.

"Please untie me," he whispered. He wriggled his wrists a little in the rawhide bonds, trying to ease the pain. The coarse leather had blistered his skin during the day and the slightest pressure was a needle of fire.

"I'm sorry, me darling." She picked a fragment of meat from the dish; she'd already cut it up for him. "His High-And-Mightiness seems to think you'll run off, and then where would we all be?" She blew on the meat to cool it. Steam curled from it, white in the firelight.

"Please." He tried not to sound scared, but panic scratched behind the shut doors in his mind. The Dark Ones coming. The wizards in the camp setting out flares, setting out what looked like stones, gray lumps woven around with tangled tentacles of iron and light.

Fire columning up from them, the wizards' faces illuminated, tattooed patterns lacing their shaved skulls and grim fear in their eyes. His father's warriors bracing themselves with their flamethrowers and swords, and the one wizard who'd been engulfed by those rubbery tentacles, falling away from their grip only a heap of red-stained, melted, smoking bones.

It was only a memory. It had happened thousands of years ago. The Dark Ones weren't coming back.

Hethya made a growl in her throat, glanced back at Bektis, and pushing Tir around by his shoulders, yanked the knots free of the bindings. The rawhide jerking away brought tears to his eyes, and the cold in the open cuts was excruciating.

She turned him around back. "Just till you finish eating, mind," she said.

Tir whispered, "Thank you."

"Not so fast, child."

Bektis rose from his place by the fire, crossed to where Hethya sat tailor-fashion in front of Tir, Tir kneeling with the food bowl between his knees. Tir got to his feet; Hethya too.

Tir tried hard to keep his voice steady. "I won't run away. I just..." He couldn't finish. Couldn't tell this tall bearded man how badly it terrified him, not to have the use of his hands, not to be able to run in this place where the Dark had descended on them, this place at the far end of that blind corridor of memories.

Bektis said softly, "See that you don't."

The flourish of his arm, wrist, and elbow leading-like Gingume at the Keep who'd been an actor in Penambra before the Dark came, seemed to reach out, to gather in the formless prairie night.

Gold eyes flashed there. Ground mist and shadow coalesced. Something moved.

Tir's heart stood still.

"You know what I am, don't you, child?" murmured Bektis. "You know what I can do. I know the names of the wolfen-kind; I can summon the smilodonts from their lairs and the horrible-birds from where they nest in the rocks. At my bidding they will come."

The camp was surrounded with them. Huge, half-unseen shaggy shapes, snuffing just out of the circle of the firelight. Elsewhere the glint of foot-long fangs. A snarl like ripping canvas. Tir glanced back, again, despairingly, at the pitiful handful of flames, the three black warriors crouched beside it, staring around them into the dark with worried silver-gray eyes.

Hethya put her arms over his shoulders, pulled him to her tight. "Quit terrifyin' the boy, you soulless hellkite." She ruffled Tir's hair comfortingly. "Don't you worry, sweeting." Bektis glared at her for silence-after hesitation she said, "Just you stay inside the camp and you'll be well."

Stomach churning with fright, Tir looked from her face to Bektis' cold dark eyes, then to the lightless infinity beyond the fire's reach. Movement still padded and sniffed in the long grass. Waiting for him. He didn't want to-she'd kidnapped him, dragged him away here, lied to him, she was part of Bektis' evil troupe-but he found himself clinging desperately to this woman's arm.

She added, a little more loudly, "He's such a great wizard, he can keep all those nasties at bay, sweeting.

They won't be coming near to the camp, just you see. Now come." She drew him toward the fire, opposite where Bektis had resumed his seat.

"Have yourself a bite to eat, and roll up and sleep. It's been a rough day on you, so it has." She meant to be kind, so Tir didn't say anything and tried to eat a little of the meat and potatoes she offered him. But his stomach hurt so much with fear he could barely choke down a mouthful, and he shook his head at the rest.

When he lay down in her blankets next to her, with the swarthy guards keeping watch, he could still hear the hrush of huge bodies slipping through the grass, the thick heavy pant of breath. Could smell, mingled with the earth smell and rain smell and new spring grasses, the rank carnivore stink.

All these interlaced with the clucking of the stream in the gully and lent a horror to dreams in which Rudy's death-over and over, struck by lightning, endlessly falling from the jutting rocks into blackness-alternated with the slow flood of still darker blackness spreading to cover the wizards' flares, to cover them all.

Then he'd wake, panting with terror, to hear only far-off thunder and the endless hissing of the prairie winds.