Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 6

Shadow passed over the grass.

The Icefalcon turned, scalp prickling, then scanned the sky. There was no sign of a bird.

The chill wind of morning rippled miles of grass and brought the smoke of the camp on Bison Hill. They were waiting for someone, the Icefalcon thought.

Or for some event, as Wise Ones waited for conjunctions of stars and planets that would increase and focus their power. Above the coulee, black birds now gathered in clouds, but none circled anywhere near the hill.

A smoke-colored flicker in the corner of his eye, and this time he was sure of it. Ears tilted inquiringly, Yellow-Eyed Dog raised his nose from his paws and sniffed the air. The sky was empty overhead.

"What is it?" whispered Loses His Way.

The Icefalcon drew breath and relaxed a little, as much as he ever relaxed or could relax.

"Cold Death," he said.

It was after noon, the day following Tit's abduction from the Keep, that a mixed company of Guards and other Keep soldiery under command of Janus of Weg finally reached the gorge where Rudy lay.

Once it grew light enough to see, Gil climbed the rocks two or three times, snow still falling heavily, to lay out branches and rocks and to carve laborious notches with her footprints in the snow, showing where they were. She had just returned from gathering more wood when she heard voices on the rocks above.

"Gaw, what a mess," said the familiar backcountry drawl of the Commander-and a heavenly choir of angels playing the back half of "Layla" on electrified harps couldn't have been sweeter to her ears-"I thought you said you could chase the snow-clouds out onto the plain, me dumpling."

"They should have gone." Brother Wend's soft voice was puzzled. "It's unheard of for weather to cling this long after the Summoner has departed. I think... I'm not sure, but I think there are spells of danger up ahead as well, avalanche and anger among the beasts of the mountains."

Janus cursed. "Bektis was never that strong," he said. There was a scuffle, and a couple of little snow-slips tumbled down the rock face. Then Gil saw the black shapes of the Guards, and a couple of the white clothed warriors of Lord Ankres' company, scrambling down the way she had marked.

Wend knelt beside Rudy and exclaimed in shock, pulling off his heavy gloves at once to weave spells of healing and stasis over the great burns and cuts on Rudy's face and chest. Meanwhile, Janus and the others spread out along the frozen stream to cut saplings for a litter.

The Icefalcon's makeshift wall had served to keep the niche under the overhang warm through the night and into morning, but Rudy's face wore the look of death.

"Don't die on me, man," Gil whispered, in her disused English, as she watched the priest-wizard's fingers trace again and again the lines of healing and strength over the still, hawknosed face.

She'd have to face Alde, too.

The Lady of the Keep awaited them on the shallow steps of the black fortress, wrapped thick in the faded rainbow of her coat of quilted silk scraps.

Like a crooked scarecrow, the Bishop Maia of Renweth stood beside her, and on her other side her friend and maidservant Linnet unobtrusively held her hand.

There were other people as wellthe Keep Lords, and Ilae, and the entrepreneurs who functioned more or less as neighborhood bosses-but as she walked beside Rudy's litter with the scrag-end of the storm winds lashing at her face, Alde was all Gil saw.

The younger woman's jaw set, body stiffening, drawing in on itself for protection, when it was clear to her that Tir wasn't among the returning Guards.

"Rudy's alive," Gil called, as they came near enough for her voice to be heard without shouting. "The Icefalcon's gone after Bektis and Tir. Tir seems to be all right."

"Thank you." Gil could only guess at Alde's reply by the movement of her lips. Wind lifted the Lady's hair, a shroud of night, as she descended the steps to grasp and kiss Rudy's nerveless hand.

Undemonstrative herself, Gil did the only thing she could think of to do to help her friend through the hours of the evening and the night.

She stayed beside her in the cell to which they brought Rudy, a chamber in the Royal Sector whose round tiled heating stove and larger bed made it more comfortable than the young mage's narrow quarters off the wizards' workroom on first level south. Neither Ilae nor Wend had had early training in their craft, both having denied or neglected their talents in the days before the coming of the Dark Ones.

But Wend had, through the years of his priesthood, practiced surreptitiously the healing magic on those members of the small western community who had been in his care, and both he and the red-haired girl had seven years of formal teaching.

Together they worked spells of strength and stability on Rudy's heart and nervous system, and of healing on his flesh, drew runes and circles of power around the herbs they prepared to combat infection.

Through the night Minalde stayed quietly in a corner of the room, fetching water or lint, feeding the fire or holding the knots on bandages when such things were called for.

Linnet disappeared to look after Gisa, the daughter Alde had borne Rudy in the Summerless Year, who at eighteen months was old enough to know something was desperately wrong, and to care for Gil's son Mithrys; Gil remained at Alde's side.

She didn't say much-she had never known what to say to someone in grief or pain-but once Alde reached out and took her hand and squeezed it hard enough to hurt.

Later she asked, "Did you see Tir?" and Gil shook her head.

"I heard him call out Rudy's name," she said. In the soft double glow of lampflame and witchlight, Alde's face seemed thin and old, an echo of the old woman she would one day be.

A woman who had lost the husband she adored and feared, and had seen the brother she had worshipped turn tyrant and monster, who had survived the crumbling of her world and found in its wreck a love like the rising of the stars.

"We saw his tracks a couple of times, when they let him off the donkey. I think that Hethya woman must have gotten him out of the Keep to look at the caves along the north side of the Vale, and Bektis put a glamour on one of those warriors he had with him to make Tir think it was Rudy."

Alde only nodded, her face an ivory death mask.

"I never thought Bektis would possess the power to hold storms so long after he had gone." Brother Wend turned on his three-legged stool, drying his hands on a coarse hempcloth towel, a dark-haired little man whose priestly tonsure had grown in when he left the Church, only to be replaced by his hairline's early retreat. "Of course, he will always be a greater wizard than I, but..." He shook his head.

"He had a... a device of some kind," said Gil. "This kind of crystal thing strapped on his hand. It may just have been reflection, but it looked like it lit up when Bektis threw lightning or defended himself against Rudy's spells. He's a stronger wizard than Rudy is anyway, but if it was a magnifier or amplifier of some kind..."

Ilae looked up from grinding dried purple-bead roots in the mortar. "Does such a thing exist?"

"Who knows?" Gil replied. "We don't know what's been stashed away all these years, left over from the Times Before. Ingold is always finding references to stuff the Church confiscated and hid and never talked about."

"And with good reason, if legend is anything to go by." Maia stood in the doorway, his long face lined with concern. "How is he?"

"About the same." Gil shrugged, hiding fear and anxiety, as the Icefalcon did. "Maybe other people hid stuff, too, out of fear of the Church or of their neighbors. Now those places have been broken open, and nobody's keeping an eye on them anymore." She glanced sidelong at Maia.

"Why do you think Ingold's been in such a panic to find books and implements and whatever other apparatus he can?"

"There were certainly records in my episcopal palace of things I did not understand, hidden in places lost to anyone's memory," the tall Bishop agreed. "We do not even know what may still be hidden in this Keep, untouched since the Dark's first rising."

"And it's a good guess Govannin had a couple of secrets on hand. For all she carried on about mages being soulless tools of Evil, she was quick enough to use black magic in anything she considered a good cause. If Bektis ever did manage to break her hold on him, you can bet your best fur booties he'd help himself to whatever he could stick in his pockets."

"How soon will the storm clear?" Alde, who had sat all this while with bowed head in silence, now looked up at Wend. "How soon can a party go over the pass in pursuit?"

"I'll go out there in the morning," the physician promised. "Even the strongest spells disperse, if their maker is not there renewing them. I'm not the weather-witch Bektis is, but I should be able to hasten their breaking."

"How soon?" Her eyes were like the heart of the night, her voice porcelain, cold and friable, as if it would shatter at a touch.

"Tomorrow afternoon?"

She whispered again, "Thank you." Her small hands closed around Rudy's brown, cold fingers, seeking reassurance, perhaps hoping to hold his spirit to his flesh. She hadn't touched the tisane Linnet had brought, or the supper, either. Gil knew better than to think that she would unless forced.

I'd better get some sleep, thought Gil. And pack.

She remembered the three identical warriors. Were others waiting to join Bektis once he got over the pass? A dozen or a hundred, cookie-cuttered out of some unguessable spell? Ingold had never mentioned such a thing to her, nor Bektis' jeweled weapon, either.

How could she, and the Guards, and a novice like Wend cope with those and whatever else the sorcerer had up his fur-lined sleeves? But the concern turned out to be moot. An hour or so later Ilae put down her herbs and sat up straight, her hand going to her temple, her eyes suddenly flaring wide. "Damn," she said.

Alde, her hand still locked around Rudy's where she sat on the floor, a pillow at her back, looked up sharply at the note in the girl's voice. "What is it?"

"I..." Ilae hesitated, frowning, listening hard to sounds only she could hear. Then the witchlight brightened behind her head as she dug in the purse at her belt for a scrying stone, a ruby Ingold had found in the ruins of Penambra, which she turned and maneuvered in the sharp glint of the light.

"Damn," she said again, more forcefully, and pushed her rusty hair out of her eyes. "There're men coming up the road from the river valley, my Lady. Lots of men-horses-spears glittering in the moonlight..."

"What?" Alde surged lithely to her feet, crossed the room in a flurry of petticoats, and looked over Ilae's shoulder as if she too could see in the jewel. "Where?"

"They've just passed the wards we set up in the Arrow Gorge. Hundreds, it looks like. Carts and tents."

She looked up into the Lady's face with baffled eyes. "It's hard to see in darkness, but I think they're black-faced, black-skinned, the men of the Alketch, and the brown men of the Delta islands with gold beads in their hair. They're coming fast."

Alde cursed, something she seldom did. "Send for Janus," she said. "We need to meet them at the Tall Gates and hold them there, if we can. Thank you, Ilae..."

Gil was already out of the room, striding down the Royal Way toward the Aisle and the lamplit watchroom of the Guards.

The Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched Bektis' camp through the night, turn and turn about with hunting small game in the coulee. They worked mostly in businesslike silence, though Loses His Way asked about the conditions of grass on the eastern side of the mountains, and the movements of mammoth and bison herds, always a fruitful topic among the peoples of the Real World.

He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most mud-diggers.

"It is very foolish not to know whether your horses are the sons and daughters of brave beasts or cowards," he said gravely, stripping the skin from a woodchuck he had shot while Yellow-Eyed Dog slaveringly feigned disinterest.

They sheltered in another bison wallow, not the one southeast of the hill but an older one to the southwest, full of curly buffalo grass and pennyroyal, with a good view over the broken lands to the south.

"How can you know what they will do if you don't know about their ancestors before them? These mud-diggers of yours want all the wrong things and don't know what is important."

"They are not my mud-diggers," pointed out the Icefalcon. "And I have told them this many times."

"Then why do you follow this shaman? This child is not your kin. He may even be your enemy." He used the word dingyeh, "notkin," oktep in the tongue of the Talking Stars, and set the strips of woodchuck flesh over the hot coals of last night's fire to roast.

"The child is..." The Icefalcon was silent a moment, trying to phrase his relationship to Eldor-and to the people in the Keep-in terms that could be understood in the Real World. There was much about his new life that he could not explain in terms of the old.

At length he said, "The child's father helped me and gave me shelter when I departed from my own people."

"Did you need shelter?" asked Loses His Way.

"No. But for his sake I would not like to see the boy come to harm. What troubles me now, is that Bektis must be watching his back trail..."

And then they were no longer two, but three. The Icefalcon couldn't even tell how long she'd been there.

She was a diminutive woman, with the black hair that sometimes marked Wise Ones in the Real World.

From babyhood her parents had shaved it off, so she had never learned to regard it. It was hacked off short now, straight as water and heavy as the hand of fate. When the Icefalcon had seen her last, it had not yet been touched by gray. Her eyes were black, too.

"Little brother," she said.

"Elder sister." He inclined his head. "You know Loses His Way, our enemy from the Empty Lakes People."

She nodded. Everyone in the Real World knew everyone else, pretty much, or at least knew of them.

"It pleases me to see that you were not devoured by the Eaters in the Night, o my sister. I had heard that they singled out the Wise."

She smiled, small but very bright, like a star. "Then I suppose I am not all that Wise."

She picked a pink-edged flower of bindweed and turned it in her fingers, smiling at the silkiness of the petals under her touch. "Do they still haunt the lands west of the wall of snows, little brother?"

He shook his head. "At the end of that first winter a Wise One there sent them away to the other side of Night, where no people live and it is night forever. They have not returned again."

"Good," said Cold Death briskly and worked the flower into the end of the Icefalcon's braid among the bones.

"I thought it must have been something of the kind. Now who is this Bektis, and why does it concern you that he watches his back trail?" She sat down crosslegged between them and picked the woodchuck's heart out of the coals, devouring it with an expression of ecstasy. "Was it he who slew five of the Empty Lakes People and put their bodies in the coulee, or was that you, little brother?"

"It was Bektis," the Icefalcon said a little grumpily because he loved woodchuck hearts with a great, strong love. "And those with him."

He gave her a quick summary of the events of the past four days, finishing with, "He is a fool, but not so much a fool that he would not watch his back trail, knowing that he was observed in carrying the boy away. He knows that the warriors of the Keep will bear stronger amulets against his spells of battle illusion and battle panic than the warriors of the Empty Lakes People, whose shaman Walking Eyes was killed by the Eaters seven years ago, yet he displays no concern over the matter. He waits here for something."

Cold Death tousled the dog's ruff. "For the rest of the black warriors," she said. The dog sniffed at her and licked her hand.

"T'cha!" scolded Loses His Way amiably. "You kiss your people's enemies, o my brother?"

"He tastes her that he may devour her later," explained the Icefalcon, and the warchief nodded.

"Very well, then."

"Ninety-eight of them are a day south of here," Cold Death went on. "Tonight you'll be able to see their fires. As for why he shows no concern about pursuit... "

She frowned. She had sharp little flecks of brow, pulling together over a short snub nose.

"There is power in that band," she said. "They have twelve wagons covered in blue canvas, and surrounding them... not darkness, but a movement that bends the shape of the air."

She shook her head and tried to shape some kind of meaning with her square brown short-fingered hand.

"There is evil in them, such as I have never before seen. Demons follow them, and the elementals of water and air and earth. Blue Child follows these warriors and their wagons at a distance."

"And does the Blue Child," asked the Icefalcon softly, "ride these lands?"

"These lands are ours," said Cold Death. "Unto the Night River Country and down to the Bones of God."

Loses His Way hackled like a wolf at the suggestion that the Iarger portion of the Real World did not in fact belong to the Empty Lakes People, but Cold Death continued unconcernedly, picking another flower. "It was Blue Child who sent me scouting, to see who or what awaited this dark captain, with the hook for his hand, at Bison Hill."

Bison Hill was the only place the mud-diggers used for meetings, the only landmark large enough to catch their blunted attention. The Icefalcon only asked, "A hook?"

Vair na-Chandros, he thought. It had to be.

"A big man with hair that curls like that of a bison's hump, gray with age, not white in youth as many of the black warriors. His eyes are yellow and his voice like dirt in a tin pot. He has a silver hook in place of his right hand, and his men call him Lord. You know this man?"

"I know him." The Icefalcon's face was impassive as he turned the woodchuck meat on the flat rocks among the coals.

"In the days of the Dark ones, this hook-handed one commanded the forces of the Alketch that came to help humankind against the Dark. He abandoned them in the burning Nests that he might preserve his own followers when he went to war in the Alketch. After that I am told he tried to make himself Emperor of the South by wedding the old Emperor's daughter against her will. Now he rides north, does he, with less than six score men, and wagons filled with uncanny things?"

He sat up a little and gazed south across the broken lands, green miles of chilly springtime where a red-tailed hawk circled lazily and a couple of uintatheria, ungainly moving mountains with their tusked and plated heads swinging back and forth, ambled from one gully to another in their eternal quest for fresh leaves.

But what he saw was the rainbow figure descending the steps of the Keep in the mists and the hatred in those fox-gold eyes when they looked on Ingold Inglorion.

He saw too the upraised hooks, scarlet with firelight, summoning back his troops out of the darkness of the burning Nests. Saw Ingold-and hundreds of others-engulfed and borne away by the Dark.

It came back to him also what Gil-Shalos had told him about the Emperor's daughter of the South.

"I like this not, o my sister," he said at last. "This Vair is an evil man, and now you tell me he rides with an evil magic in his train. Whether this be a mage or a talisman or an object of power, I would feel better if I knew something more of his intent, before he takes the boy into his grasp. Will you remain here, my enemy, and look out for the boy? If they await Vair's coming, having brought Tir this distance, he should be safe enough."

"I will abide," said the warchief. "He owes me somewhat, this Wise One."

"Good." The Icefalcon rose. "Then let us ride, o my sister," he said.

Bright against the green-black trees, a red scarf flashed, slashing to and fro.

"They're in sight," said Melantrys of the Guards.

As when wind passes over a standing grove, with a single movement the men and women on the north watchtower bent their bows, hooked the strings into place. Another movement-another wind gust the soft deadly clattering of arrow shafts.

The same wind moved Gil, automatic now but still rich with heightened sensation in her mind and heart: the spiny rough feathers, the waxy smoothness of horsehair and yew. From the watchtower's foot the narrow road led down to the Arrow River Gorge, champagne-pale between clustering walls of mingled green: fir, hawthorn, hazel, fern.

Rustling muttered above the breeze shift of the trees. Sharp as the red arbutus in the ditches came the whinny of horses.

"The fat bleedin' shame of it," sighed Caldern, a northcountry man so big he looked like a thunderstorm in his black Guards tunic and coat. "Whatever you do, lassie, don't kill the horses. We can aye use 'em."

Rishyu Hetakebnion, Lord Ankres' youngest son, whispered to Gil, "Do you think we'll turn them back?"

He'd spent hours dressing and braiding his hair for this occasion. He hadn't liked being put in the north tower company as a common archer, but his father had insisted upon it: If you're going to give commands one day, you must first learn how to obey them.

Gil shook her head. "Not a hope."

The leading ranks of the Alketch army came into view.

It is no easy matter to count troops and estimate materiel through a hunk of ensorcelled ruby an inch and three-quarters long: scrying can tell a wizard where and if, but seldom how many.

By the time Melantrys and Lank Yar, the Keep's chief hunter, returned from reconnaissance with the news that the Alketch troops numbered nearly eleven hundred strong, the enemy was only hours from the Tall Gates.

They were armed for siege, too, Melantrys said. Mules and oxen hauled two "turtles," constructions of log and leather designed to protect soldiers while they undermined towers and walls.

With a full muster of the Keep's available warriors and all ablebodied adults to back them up, Janus estimated they could hold the Tall Gates for a time, but against trained men the cost would probably be terrible.

"With all due respect to Mistress Hornbeam and Master Barrelstave," he'd whispered to Minalde at the tense convocation that had followed Melantrys' return, "one seasoned warrior properly armed can account for half a dozen volunteers. Leavin' aside that we can't afford to lose a soul here, their line'll cave.

And for what?"

The commander of the Alketch troops was a srocky goldenskinned Delta Islander in an inlaid helmet bristling with spikes. He drew rein just where the road curved on its final approach to the Gates, and Gil could see the choke of men behind him, armored in bronze and steel and black-lacquered cane in the milky light of the overcast morning.

Looking at the Tall Gates.

"That's it," murmured Janus, a few feet along the makeshift wood rampart from where Gil stood. He wore full battle gear, something fewer than half the Guards possessed: black enameled breastplate and helm, rerebraces and pauldrons and gloves, unornamented save for the gold eagles of the House of Dare.

"Think about it real good before you come on, me jolly boy. Surely there's another party you can go to instead?"

But Gil knew there wasn't. With the slow-growing cold of the Summerless Year, even the settlements along the river valley had waned, dying out or succumbing to bandit troops. She had heard that the situation in the Felwoods was worse.

The Keep of Dare in its high cold vale was the last organized center of civilization for many, many leagues, the last large, stable source of food production. Elsewhere was only banditry, White Raiders, and spreading chaos.

There was no other party to go to.

For the past seven years, the people of the Keep had been working on the watchtowers of the Tall Gates. They'd repaired the old stonework as well as they could without proper quarrying tools and raised palisades of sharpened tree trunks around the platforms on top.

Bandit troops had burned the towers twice, but even before the disaster of the Summerless Year it had been hard to get draft animals to haul stone up from the river valley.

Gil would have bet a dozen shirt-laces they would be in flames again within an hour, had she been able to find a taker.

Between the towers another palisade stretched, a rough chevaux-de-friese of outward-pointing stakes, hastily cut and sharpened, fired hard, braced in the earth, and interwoven with all the brush that could be gathered to make the hedge thicker yet.

Eleven hundred troops, thought Gil, her gloved fingers icy on the arrow-nock. They weren't going to turn back.

Battle drums echoed in the high rocks of the pass, ominous, palpable in the marrow of the bones. The golden commander edged his golden horse aside. The ranks parted-ebony soldiers from the Black Coast, ivory from the White, and the red-brown D'haalac borderlanders.

Variegated banners lifted and curled in the morning wind. For some reason Gil remembered old Dr.

Bannister of the UCLA history department, dry and fragile as a cast cicada skin, standing at the lecture-hall podium saying, "Henry II marched his armies against Philip Augustus..."

Just that. Marched his armies. No wet boots and feet that ached with cold. No rush of adrenaline or hammering heart at the thought: What if I die...?

Marched his armies.

The turtles lumbered eyelessly to the walls.

They were sturdily built, Gil had to give them that. She couldn't imagine how they'd gotten them across the Arrow River. She saw the overlapping hides black with water-they must weigh tons-and heard the squeak of the overburdened wheels.

Arrows rained down from both gate towers, answered from slits in the walls and roofs. Gil wasn't fooled.

The men inside only waited for the real attack, the attempt by soldiers on foot to take the turtles.

"Come on, Ilae," whispered Melantrys, drawing, nocking, firing like a machine behind her tangle of beams and brush, "do your stuff." The nearer turtle lurched and rocked a little, then came on. Gil guessed that Ilae's spells of damage-broken axles, jammed wheels, wouldn't have much effect.

If Bektis could lay a weather-spell on the pass that would hold a storm there for almost forty-eight hours-and by the clouds still roiling over the Hammerking it was even yet going strong-his counterspells of ward on the turtles would be more than sufficient to thwart a novice like Ilae.

Certainly when the men poured forth from them and began hacking and rending at the chevaux-de-frise between the towers, they showed no immediate signs of being affected by whatever panic and terror-spells the girl could muster.

Rudy could probably have summoned better ones, but again, if Bektis had had sufficient time to manufacture wards and amulets against such spells, probably even Ingold couldn't have done much.

On the other hand, Ilae's fire-spell transforming the entire barricade into a wall of flame worked just fine.

Men scattered back, dropping their shields and falling under the steady downpour of arrows. Gil's forearm stung where the bowstring smote the leather guard.

Her fingers smarted, and smoke teared her eyes and made it hard to aim. More warriors pressed forward from the throat of the pass, armored and bearing big man-covering shields.

Camp slaves, unarmored and dragging brush, came up behind them, piling the tinder around the walls of the watchtowers: "Right," said Janus softly. "Time to be off, children. I guess they really, really want in."

There was no surprise in his voice, nor did Gil feel any. No commander would muster a force that large, or construct siege equipment, on a chance raid.

A second volley of arrows burst from the trees on both sides of the pass as Lank Yar and his hunters responded to Janus' signal to cover. Slaves fell, dying, innocent of the war that spilled their blood. Smoke rolled up the inside of the tower like a chimney as the archers streamed down the winding stair inside, Gil coughing, heat beating on her skin.

This in some ways was the worst, and the only time when she felt in genuine danger. She slung her bow onto her back and joined the files of Guards-and of Ankres' mixed troop of his own men, Lord Sketh's, and the Church warriors who made up the archers on the south tower-in the fast march-run across the open Vale, to the Doors of the Keep.

Dr. Bannister should see me now.

If the turtles got through the burning barricade too fast and made a path for the horses, there was a chance that Janus' retreating force could be ridden down and killed.

But they weren't. Gil didn't dare look back, with men and women running on both sides of her, two and a half miles up the rising ground from the Tall Gates to the Keep on its knoll. On reaching the steps she turned, panting, troopers streaming past her and through the Doors, and saw the small Alketch cavalry galloping in futile pursuit.

In the aspen groves that surrounded the towers Lank Yar's hunters were still showering the attackers with missiles, bales of which had been hidden in the caves northwest of the Keep and in a hundred other caches, where the little corps of volunteers would be able to get to them in the sniping guerrilla campaign to come.

Once the Doors were closed and the Alketch troops took the Vale, Lank Yar and his hunters would be on their own. They'd do a certain amount of damage, thought Gil, as the Guards and the white clothed warriors of House Ankres filed past her, but they certainly wouldn't drive the invaders away.

The fires around the towers were losing their first force. Smoke poured white into the sapphire sky, pierced now and again by flame, like many-colored silk thrashing in high wind. A few trees caught, as they generally did.

"Are you having second thoughts?"

Minalde stood at her side, white-faced and drawn. She held her daughter Gisa firmly by the hand, the dark-haired child looking about her with wonderment in her dark-blue eyes.

Gil drew in her breath, and let it out. "No," she said. "If it's a choice between in or out..." She hooked her hands through her sword-sash. "You're losing Wendie's help inside as it is. If something goes wrong, I think I'll be more use inside. I don't think I'd make that much difference when the guys go over the pass to find Tir."

Alde looked away and nodded. Gil could feel her tension at the boy's name.

"Hey," said Gil softly. "The Icefalcon will find him. He'll bring him in back." Charles Lindbergh probably said the same thing to his wife. Of course, Charles Lindbergh didn't have the Icefalcon looking for his vanished child, either. "How's Rudy?"

"Alive." The gesture of Alde's fingers tried to brush the topic aside, unbearable to the touch. There was silence before she could go on. "The same, Wend says. I... I suppose all we can do now is sit tight, as you say."

The last stragglers passed them, panting and joking among themselves, still high with the rush of escape.

A hundred yards off the cavalry wheeled, helmet spikes flashing in the sun.

Pale spring sun, thought Gil, bright on the thick new grass of the Vale. The translucent glister of glaciers, opal walls along the black cliffs, miles high; grizzled pines and quicksilver streams; the mirror flash of bogs and glabrous acres of slunch. A hawk turning, infinitely tiny against the sky. Morning light.

She drained it deep, like her high school friend Sherry Reinhold going on one last binge before the diet that always started tomorrow... In or out. One choice, for who knew how long and under what circumstances?

"Time to get inside, me Lady." Janus pulled off his helmet, graying rufous hair hanging in sweaty strings in his eyes. Calculation in that pug face, and worry; the smell of his sweat and the armor's leather straps.

Once the Doors were shut-once the Alketch army was free to surround the black walls of the Keep-everyone's options would be limited.

From the twin columns of smoke under the eastern mountain wall dark worms of men crept out.

Weapons caught soft flashes of sun, banners a faded echo of the wildflower carpet they trampled.

Scrying down the road Ilae had seen their supply lines-Prandhays Keep was far enough away, God knew, but not nearly so far as the South.

The great Doors shut behind them, and Janus and Caldern turned the locking-rings. Hidden bolts and bars echoed, less a sound than a deep vibration in the glowstone shadows of the gate passage: Gil put her arm around Alde's shoulders. The two women were the last to enter the Keep.

The second set of Doors, thick metal wrought in ancient years, clanged, and all was sealed.

"All over now; nothing more to see..." The Guards sounded petty against the hugeness of the Aisle, the loom of speculation and fear. Someone saw Minalde and set up a cheer that clattered among the high catwalks of the upper levels, the cavernous sable walls.

After you've fought a battle in the morning thought Gil, it's difficult to just get out the laundry or do your gardening in the afternoon. ("Everyone in the village would come into the castle during the siege," said Dr. Bannister, nervously chewing on the fat end of his tie. ) The whole Aisle smelled of hay and the musty heaps of the tiny fodder-potatoes that for thousands of years had been this world's only acquaintance with the spud family, until Rudy's rediscovery of genuine potatoes-food-staple potatoes-two years ago.

With that discovery the Keep had become completely self-sufficient. People still tilled corn and wheat outside, but that was for surplus and variety, lagniappe. With the cattle and sheep inside, they could hold out indefinitely.

A couple of women were arguing about whose turn it was to shovel sheep dung. A man who hadn't been in the battle was explaining to Lord Ankres how the attack could easily have been turned. Rishyu Hetakebnion, hair a shambles of sweat and smoke, was quietly throwing up in a corner.

Minalde glanced back over her shoulder, at Melantrys and Janus setting the locking-rings of the inner set of Doors. "And now we wait," she murmured. She rubbed her hand over her forehead-Gisa pulled on her other hand, wanting as usual to dart away into the doorways that led to the compounds where cattle and sheep were housed. "As soon as the storms clear, Yar will send men to help the Icefalcon..."

"If he needs it." Gil grinned, and Minalde was surprised into a wan answering smile. "It can't possibly be more than a day or two, till they can start. Meanwhile Yar and his boys can give the guys outside a hard time. We'll be okay."

"We'll be okay." She repeated the words as if forcing herself to believe and drew a long, shaky breath.

"And in time, these people... What can they do? They can't get in. They'll strip the Vale of game, very soon I should think, and what then? Wait until winter? Until they get tired? Until Ingold arrives?"

Gil folded her arms, looking around her at the heaps of fodder and provisions, twice head high and still dwarfed by the Aisle's vastness. ("Provisions would be brought in from the surrounding country side...") Men and women were settling down around the little piles of glowstones, with bales and bundles of sticks and feathers and flint, to listen to storytellers while they made arrows, a wintertime occupation when there was no game or when a storm kept them in.

At the Doors Ilae stood in a halo of witchlight, checking communication through her ruby with Brother Wend, outside with Lank Yar's guerrillas. Janus and Lord Ankres went to her, asking about the black river of men, of soldiers and slaves, of siege engines and provision wagons pooling before the Doors.

The only way in or out.

Impervious from the founding of the Keep.

Gil wondered if she should keep silent. But she knew she had to say what she thought. It might just be true.

"The problem is, Alde," said Gil, "the warriors of the Alketch have to know that all they can do is sit outside till winter comes and they get buried in snow. They have to know that we have wizards here and would be able to see them coming, and get ourselves stocked up and locked down. So my questions is:

Why doesn't this bother them?"

Alde sighed, her shoulders slumping a little, and her face was again the face of a young girl. "I wish you hadn't asked that," she said.