Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 8

"She says she has never heard of such a thing in her life."

The Icefalcon sniffed. It was true that Ilae's life had not so far been very long, but it was true also that Thoth Serpentmage had taught her for five years in the half-ruined Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand, where most of the world's few remaining wizards now dwelled. It was also true that she was Ingold Inglorion's student now.

"Ask her how it fares with the siege."

Over the wide plains the sun stood a few fingers above the mountains. Wood smoke gritted on the air, and the smell of corn porridge.

The elementals of earth and water that oozed forth at the stench of blood and pain had sunk away into their native stone and streams, and the demons faded into the bright air. The Icefalcon guessed they had not gone far. Could Cold Death see them, he wondered, as the great shamans could?

"It fares well, she says." A little frown puckered between Cold Death's sparse brows. "She says the southern warriors have not even essayed to break the Doors."

"Have they not?" The Icefalcon settled his back to one of the rocks among which they crouched, down in the coulee where the night lingered blue, and folded his long arms about his drawn-up knees.

He felt no surprise.

The merchant came to mind, the brown-faced southerner who had claimed to be from Penambra, the man who had told Ingold about the cache of books in the villa in Gae. He had spoken the name of Harilomne the Heretic. And Ingold had gone.

It didn't take a Wise One or a scrying glass to deduce that the man had been dispatched by Vair.

Overhead, vultures made a slow silent pinwheel above the bodies of the slain.

The Icefalcon plucked a little dried venison from his bag and chewed it thoughtfully. "How fares Rudy Solis?"

Cold Death relayed the query to Ilae. The Icefalcon imagined Ilae herself, sitting in all probability in the long double cell the wizards used as a workroom, with its battered table of waxed oak and its great cupboards filled with scrolls, tablets, books salvaged from every library and villa they could get to, from the western ocean to the Felwoods.

Rank after polyhedronal rank of record crystals glittered frostily on shelves, the images of the Times Before for all those who could read them. He wondered if Gil would be there, too, studying the crystals by means of the black stone scrying table in the corner, seeing in it the faces of the mages who by their spells and arcane machinery had raised the Keeps against the first incursion of the Dark.

Single-minded and essentially lazy-for it was reasonable to rest and conserve energy when not either in an emergency or preparing for one-the Icefalcon regarded Gil's obsessive studies with some bemusement.

She had for years now been piecing together histories, both of the three and a half millennia that had transpired between the first arising of the Dark and the second, and of the Times Before, trying to learn what she could of the world the Dark had long ago destroyed.

This she did, she told him, as he would have sought knowledge of a trail long cold, by scratches on rocks or seeds in crumbling dung.

That she would or could do so while maintaining the brutal training required of the Guards and caring for a son now able to toddle purposefully in the direction of anything that could conceivably be complicated was, to the Icefalcon, merely an example of the alienness of her nature.

"She says he still lies unconscious." Cold Death's sweet murmur brought him from his thoughts. She held out her hand and he passed her the leathern tube-Cold Death was much enamored of venison sweetened with maple sugar. "The Lady Alde tends him, she says, and has not slept. She is much distressed."

"The child Tir is her son."

A shift in the voices of the men, the doleful complaint of mules, snagged his attention, and he swung up the stones of the low cliff until he could just put his head over the grass on the rim.

But it was only breakfast ready, not breaking camp just yet. They were lazy as bears in summer, these southerners. Some of the men gathered around the cook fires, holding out wooden plates and bowls made of gourds. Their heads were bald as new-birthed babies, their feet not clad in boots but, like the feet of Bektis' three clone warriors, wrapped in rawhide.

It was too far to distinguish clearly, but he thought they were all of the same height, the same build.

In the morning stillness the walls of the black tent hung straight, seeming to absorb the light of the pallid sun. The demon-scares flashed on their poles like the corpses of crystal insects, sinister and bright.

He slipped down the rocks to Cold Death once again. "Can you speak with the Wise One Ingold Inglorion?" he asked. "He was once called Olthas Inhathos, the Desert Walker, among the White Lakes People."

"Ah," said Cold Death softly, and smiled. She licked the venison grease from her fingers and plucked another grass blade, which she passed over the tiny pool in the rocks, no more than a cupped handful and frozen with last night's cold, and considered it with brightblack prairie-dog eyes.

"Olthas Inhathos," she said. "Desert Walker. You do not remember me, but..."

And she smiled at whatever it was that the Desert Walker replied. "Even so," she said. "I am in the badlands a day's ride south of Bison Hill with my brother Nyagchilios, the Pilgrim of the Skies, the Icefalcon of the Talking Stars People. The hook-handed bad man Vair na-Chandros is here... No, not with me but camped close by, and it appears that he can make warriors out of air. It is he who sent the army against the Keep in Renweth Vale, we think. He also-so my brother says-sent out the peddler whose story took you to Gae, that Bektis could enter the Keep undetected to steal the child Tir."

Her smile widened with delight, and to the Icefalcon she said, "The Desert Walker learned to curse from the Gettlesand cowboys, I think. My little brother is confused," she went on, turning back to the puddle of ice, "and does not know what to do."

"I never said so," the Icefalcon said frostily. Sisters. "Tell him of the black tent and the things that passed in the night."

While she did so he climbed the rocks again to watch the movements of the camp.

Under ordinary circumstances the Icefalcon would have felt no hesitation about his ability to creep into the camp itself, even by daylight. But the magic that hung so patently about the walls of that square black tent kept him at a distance.

Among his people there was a story about a coyote who went hunting with a saber-tooth and feasted in the end not only on the eggs of the horrible-bird while it was busy killing the saber-tooth-who after the fashion of such creatures didn't wait to see if there was unseen danger nearby before closing in-but on the entrails of the larger and more hasty beast itself.

"He is troubled, your Desert Walker," Cold Death said when the Icefalcon eased himself down into the crevice again. "He says he will make for the Keep with all speed. In the meantime he begs you, guard the boy Tir."

"And what of the black tent?"

"He says there is a tale about an old woman who wrought warriors out of bread dough and brought them to life with the blood from her left little finger, but he does not think this is the case. He says the Guild of Bakers would never stand for such a thing. He says he will meditate." She handed him back the bag.

"Thank him for me," retorted the Icefalcon, exasperated, and slung the bag over his shoulder again.

"Our enemy Loses His Way abides still by Bison Hill." Cold Death stood and tossed her grass blade aside. "He seems at peace, so I can assume that you were right, that the shaman Bektis awaits the coming of this Vair and will do naught to the boy in the meantime. Will you return thence now, little brother?"

"No." The Icefalcon looked around him, gauging the defensibility of the coulee. A water cut led from the main stream to their left, and having hunted here once in the past he knew there was a sort of cave under its bank a mile and a half upstream, hidden by chokecherry brambles.

"I have watched and seen no sign of another shaman," he said quietly. "Yet Vair himself is not mageborn, and there is power of some kind there. Ingold and Minalde need to know of it before Vair achieves his meeting with Bektis. Things may change after that, for better or for worse."

He unfolded his lean height-Cold Death didn't even top his shoulder-and sniffed wind and weather, listening to the voices of the camp and the sounds made by the vultures and the kites.

"If there is some magic there that demands sacrifices of pain, I think I had best know this, too, before they take possession of the child Tir."

Cold Death's face sobered, and she nodded.

"Can you work on me a spell of shadow-walking?"

Her mouth was still, but her dark eyes flickered to the brightening sky.

"I know. l have heard the Wise Ones of the Keep, Ilae and Ingold and Rudy, speak of such spells. They are more difficult to perform by daylight, but daylight would render me less easy to detect, as it does demons. I can sleep in the cave there, if you will weave the spells around me and stand guard above my body."

Still she was silent. He saw the concern for him in her eyes.

"I need to know," he said, speaking to her now not as his sister but as a shaman. "We all need to know.

And I could not protect you while you slept."

"Even so," she said, and sighed, knowing he spoke truth. "But if it is a demon in the camp that they have summoned..."

"Whatever is there, it is no demon." He gestured to the amulets, like unholy fruit glittering in the new light.

"And if there are wardspells in the camp, or some other form of spirit power that will tell them of my presence, the best time for me to enter is while they are breaking camp."

She spread her hands palm out in surrender. "So be it, then," she said. "Come."

"You go quick, now." Hethya unknotted the rope that pinched agonizingly around Tir's wrists. "He's looking into that crystal of his, so he'll be busy awhile. Don't go far."

"I won't." Tir was sufficiently grateful that this woman let him go into the woods alone to relieve himself, instead of taking him on a rope as Bektis did, that he wouldn't have gotten her into trouble by running away. Besides, he knew perfectly well there was nowhere to go. He might only be seven years old, but he knew he could not survive alone in the badlands. Whatever was happening, he was safer with Bektis-which, as Rudy would say, was a pretty scary mess to be in.

He could not rid his mind of the image of Rudy being struck by Bektis' lightning, buckling slowly forward over the cliff, falling into whirling darkness. Beside Hethya's soft-breathing warmth at night he saw it over and over again, as if it were caught like the images in Gil's record crystals, repeating itself exactly the way it had happened for all eternity. He wanted Rudy and he wanted his mother and he wanted his friends and his home, and he knew that he might never, ever see any of them again.

He knew not to go far into the woods. Hethya was watching him-turning around he could see her broad face, her rough rusty curls and the topaz-and-snuff patterns of her quilted jacket-but he knew, too, that if any trouble arose, like the White Raiders who'd attacked them the day before yesterday, that she was too far off to help.

From Tir's earliest memories there had been bandits, dire wolves, saber-teeth, and sometimes even White Raiders in the Vale of Renweth, in spite of all the patrols by Janus and the Guards. He had a healthy respect for the green-on-green isolation among the cottonwoods, boulders, and fern.

He was coming back toward camp when he found one of the Akulae dead.

The man lay on his side at the bottom of a little slope, in a nest of fern and wild grape. Tir could see no blood. It wasn't the man who'd been wounded in the fight, but Tir didn't know which of the other two it was.

His white-stubbled face, half turned up toward the dapple shade of elms and cottonwoods, was calm, stoic, and a little stupid, as it had been in life.

Tir looked around quickly. There was no danger in sight. ("It isn't the saber-tooth you see that kills you," the Icefalcon would have pointed out.) Taking a deep breath, the boy scrambled down the clayey slope.

Closer to, the body smelled of death, but not of blood. It smelled of something else, too, an ugly decay Tir couldn't recognize or define.

What if the Akula had died of the plague? Gil and Rudy and Ingold all said plague got spread by bugs too tiny to see. What if they were all over this body just waiting to jump off like fleas and onto him?

But at the same time he thought this, he was looking around, pulling a handful of big leaves off the wild-grape vine-from underneath where it wouldn't show-to shield his hands. He unbuckled the dead man's belt and pulled his dagger free, sheath and all. The leaves were awkward, and he threw them away-if he dropped dead of the plague, he thought, it couldn't be any worse than what might happen to him if he didn't have a weapon in an emergency.

He buckled the belt on the dead man again, and with some difficulty worked the dagger down into his own boot, on the inside of his leg, and pulled his trouser over to cover the hilt. There wasn't time for more. Hethya would be watching for him the moment his head disappeared from the bushes. He scrambled fast up the bank again, calling out, "Hethya! Hethya!"

He remembered to sound scared, so they wouldn't think he'd gone down to the body.

She appeared at the top of the bank and held out her hand for him, big and strong and warm. He pointed down the bank. It wasn't hard to fake fear; he was trembling all over and could hardly breathe, but he managed to say, "He's dead!"

Then Hethya did a strange thing.

She clicked her tongue-" Tsk!"-and shook her head a little and took his hand. "Let's get back to camp, sweetheart."

And that was all.

The Icefalcon crouched near the cave's entrance under the chokecherry bushes-it was too low to stand straight-while his sister marked out the four corners of the narrow place with guardian wards, then knelt to burn a pinch of the powder of dried olive leaves on which certain marks had been made to cleanse the air.

Ideally, when a scout undertook to shadow-walk-as scouts did occasionally in war, when the other family or band had a particularly powerful Wise One in their midst-he or she would lie on earth and under open sky, where neither the demons of the air nor the elementals that imbued the ground could dominate.

Given Cold Death's strength as a shaman the icefalcon did not doubt that he would be safe from elementals. Still, the damp place, closed in, green-dim, smelling of earth and foxes, made him uneasy.

The Icefalcon had never shadow-walked. It was not considered safe for boys to make the venture before they reached full manhood, and he had left the Talking Stars People in his seventeenth year. He had seen it done only twice before in his life, when the Talking Stars People had been at war with Black Pig's family of the Salt People.

On the first occasion, the shadow scout had returned safely, with information about the layout of Black Pig's summer hold in the Cruel River Country that could not be ascertained by ordinary observation.

The second time, six or seven years later during another war, the scout's friends-it was the same man who had gone before, who had experience-and Cold Death had waited by the body through three nights and two days, Cold Death weaving such spells as would draw back the scout's spirit to the empty and silent flesh.

After that the tribe had had to move on for fear of being raided by Black Pig. The next time the Talking Stars People had camped in that place Cold Death and the Icefalcon-who was sixteen then-and three or four of the scout's friends returned to the place where the body had lain and seen a few of the man's bones. What became of his spirit they never knew.

Thus it was with a certain degree of trepidation that the Icefalcon lay himself down between the four cold balls of spirit-fire that Cold Death summoned from the air and watched her drawing out Circles around him.

There was a Circle of Protection, to keep at bay the elementals and the demons that would have taken over his still living body once his spirit was no longer in residence.

"You have to watch out for them while you're walking," Cold Death said, once she had completed the marks and stood wiping ocher and blood from her fingertips. "They'll try to distract you, to get you lost once you're out there. They feed on fear and pain."

There was a Circle of Ancestors. "Do our Ancestors actually guard us when they are summoned to a Circle?" He was drowsy now with the growing effect of the spell and with the warmth of the heat spells she'd called to keep his body from dying in its sleep. He and Cold Death had watched by turns through the previous night, and neither had slept after midnight.

"I've never seen them." She leaned over him to paint the first lines of the Circle of Power across his face, his hands, his breast under the wolf-hide tunic, in a paste of mud and powdered wildcat blood.

She wove his name into them, and the image of the pilgrim-bird that dwells in the high cliffs near the glaciers, overlaid with sigils of protection.

These signs were repeated, over and over, in the lines that spiraled out from him to form the anchoring power-curves of the Circle, running up the wall and, it seemed to him in his half-dreaming state, away into the earth around him, like shining roots.

The sharp air from the cave's low opening filled the tiny space with fog, through which the wan blue spirit-fires glowed like tiny suns on a day drowned in mist. Sleepiness closed over his mind.

"You'll want to stop and look at everything." Her fingertip was cold over his hands. "Don't. You're vulnerable to everything-demons, elementals, rain, wind. The sight of the sun itself. If you get lost, you'll never find your way back. Look for the ground first. Don't forget to watch your back trail."

Back trail, he thought dreamily. Like tracking in strange country. He tried to remember what that long-ago scout had told him.

"No one is ever really prepared for what it's like." She stuck blades of grass and twigs of the elder tree-whose ancestor was one of the Fifteen Dream Things-into the crossings of the lines. "Not the first time, not the tenth time, not the twentieth. You will be terrified. You have to remember what your flesh was like, every moment, and there will be many things to make you forget. You cannot become unconscious, and you cannot sleep. Do you understand?"

He murmured, "I understand."

"Take three deep breaths, then," she said, sounding very far away. "And on the third your spirit will go out of your body. Remember that I'm here waiting."

One. Two.

He was alone, hanging in the brilliant air. Sunlight pierced him like lances, needles of pain. He was colder than he could ever remember being, empty, and terrified.

He couldn't breathe. (Of course, you fool, you have no lungs) But having no lungs did not mean that he did not feel as if he were trapped underwater in that final second before the lungs give out and inhale death. Only that second went on and on.

It was like being naked in bitter winter.

It was like the first moment after one has been thrust from the only home one has ever known, the curses of those inside ended only by the silence of the closing door.

It was like falling, only he did not seem to be getting any closer to the ground.

Look for the ground first. But the first thing he saw was the sun. It stood just above the eastern horizon still, but filled the dry air with powdered gold. He found he could look at it without injury to his eyes (You have no eyes), and the novelty of that sensation kept him looking, drinking in its light, shaken to his heart by the dense glory of its fire.

He watched it rise. Grandly, slowly, calmly...

No wonder they didn't let young adolescents do this.

He was the Icefalcon, he thought. He was the Icefalcon. He had to rescue Tir.

He had to meet Blue Child in battle, when all was done. He had to return to his people.

Look for the ground.

He looked down and was swept by wonder and delight. The world was a jewel of topaz, sepia, and a thousand breath-fine gradations of burning green. Threadlike silver lace marked the bottom of the little water cut, the greater water into which it flowed a jumble of diamond-sewn brown silk down the coulee's heart.

Every leaf and twig of the chokecherry bush over the cave-mouth blazed clear and individual, as if incised, and the tiniest, most fragile wisps of the mists from the heat-spell were each an infinite enchantment to be studied, reveled in, adored.

The grasslands were a wonderment beyond wonderment, shape and texture and scent that made him want to rub his face against them as against velvet, the bison shaggy houses with frost in their curly fur.

Far off, minute and perfect, lay the exquisite ring of a prairie-dog town.

The twelve blue wagon-tops made a circle in the emerald grass, the horses, streaming out from the opening, a school of brown and black and golden fish. Foreshortened warriors in bronze or sable leather milled about the pale daytime cook fire.

The black tent was a square of horror against the wagon's square of midnight blue.

Ah.

Then like silver fire a demon struck him, an eel blazing out of invisibility to rip his flesh from his bones.

The Icefalcon cried out, thorned ropes of pain tearing through his heart.

A human's bones protected a spirit. Flesh and muscle were armor, and he had none now. The demon pierced him as the sunlight had done, the pain coring him, dizzy, smothering...

They feed on fear and pain.

He could feel them eat. Smoky shapes, toothed fantastic horrors encircling him, he was falling, plunging, dying...

What happens when I hit the ground? I have no bones. Cold-headed reasonableness came back. I have no flesh. The pain is an illusion.

It was a lifelike one.

Damn the lot of you. Starve and die. It was hard to say it, but he was-he reminded himself-the Icefalcon, who would have been warchief of his people, and he made himself say it, and believe.

He was still falling, but now he stopped himself from doing so, as he sometimes could in dreams, and walked down the air as down a flight of steps. A demon bit his foot, the pain exactly as if he'd trodden a dagger-blade, but his mind remained locked on the shape of his body and bones, waiting for him in the cave.

Starve and die, he told them again.

They spit at him and swirled away. He knew they'd be back. The smell of grass and sod met him as he reached the ground, a great intoxicating earthy rush. He saw the ants creeping between the grass blades, sunlight on pebbles like reflective glass.

He could distinguish the separate perfumes of needlegrass, squirreltail grass, buffalo grass, the scents of each flower one from another-even the differing odors of clay and mold and rock. A madness of beauty as intense as the terror of the pain before.

A man came up out of a bison wallow (flesh, clothes, sweat, leather), carrying the dead body of one of the Empty Lakes People over his back, and walked ahead of the Icefalcon toward the camp. The Icefalcon followed him, feeling naked, as if every man among those wagons could see him clearly.

As they approached the circle of wagons the Icefalcon understood why Cold Death had kept her distance from the place and had told Blue Child to do the same. Even as the demon had been visible to him, certain things looked different now, and he was almost certain that it was not a mage that had kept Cold Death from seeing into the camp.

Some of the demon-scares-not all-blazed with ugly radiance, the air between them latticed with spells of pain. Past them he beheld the black tent and the wagon against which it stood, lambent with an unhealthy glow, a living rot that pulsed like a heart. Cold Death had told him that her spells would guard him against the demon-scares, but the fear of them still grew as he walked up to their line: he would be trapped, shredded, lose himself...

But if he was the icefalcon, he could and would endure. Another man walked past him. A golden-skinned Delta Islander, carrying over his shoulder the body of Long-Flying Bird. Not permitting himself to think, the Icefalcon followed him into the camp, pain dicing him, disorienting, breathless...

But he was through.

The camp stank of magic. The very air there was dark, and moved. All about him warriors saddled, harnessed, rolled blankets, unfastened the chains from the wagon-beds.

Boxed up gourd bowls and trudged up from the coulee with barrels black-wet and slopping over with flashing frigid springwater. Checked their gear and got it and themselves into marching order.

It was hard not to lose himself in the clamor and noise, hard to remember why he was here and what he needed next to do.

White Mustaches was explaining something patiently to a paleskinned warrior from the White Coasts: how to harness the mules. The Icefalcon caught words he knew: "... same... both sides..." He was demonstrating the strap lengths. "Balance." The pale warrior only stared, puzzled, from him to the half-harnessed mule and passed a hand over his slick pate. White Mustaches demonstrated again:

"balance."

What warrior, after traveling nearly eight hundred miles from the Alketch, would still not know how to harness mules?

Another man came up carrying bowls-the same man. Not just a pale man of the White Coasts, but identical in face, in body, in the way he walked. A black sergeant in red-laced boots had to tell him where to stow his burden. The Icefalcon looked around. There could not be so many pairs of twins in a single company of warriors. Not just twins: sets of three and four, as alike as millet seeds.

Clones, Gil had said.

The Icefalcon looked again. Never more than four to a set, and only one of any set wore boots. The other three had rawhide rags wrapped around their feet, as had the clone warriors he'd followed from the mountains.

The rawhide strips were all new.

The men with full heads of hair, and boots, tried not to look at those without them. Sometimes they'd mutter but most often only turned aside.

Vair na-Chandros passed him, close enough to touch, the reek of blood and attar of roses mingling in his clothes. He was making for the black tent, the Truth-Finder walking quietly at his side. The Icefalcon would sooner have picked up a live coal, but he followed them as they lifted the black curtains and passed within.

Masses of lamps hung from the roof, like hornet's nests in a building deserted for three generations, but fewer than half still burned. Most of the candles ranged on planks along the walls, or, standing clumped on iron holders, were guttered to yellow phantasms of twisted wax, and the smell of spent oil, smoke, and tallow mingled with the stench of rotted blood. You could have cut the block of air contained within the tent with a wire, like cheese.

As the Icefalcon had already guessed, the blue cloth of the wagoncover had been tied back so that the wagon itself made a raised annex onto the square chamber of the tent.

There were demon-scares everywhere, depending from every lamp-cluster and pole-end. Being in the tent was like being devoured by ants. A couple of the clone warriors were taking down lampstands and packing up candles. They'd be breaking the tent soon.

The tent contained what was almost certainly apparatus that dated from the Times Before.

Gil will be pleased, thought the Icefalcon.

It resembled in workmanship the little that the Icefalcon had seen at the Keep, the pieces from which Rudy had constructed flamethrowers to fight the Dark Ones, and some of what had turned out to be lamps in the crypts where the hydroponics tanks were.

A deep vat, or sarcophagus, occupied most of the wagon-bed. Wooden stairs went up to it, the straw on them, and on the floor of the tent itself, so soaked in blood that it squished under the feet of the men.

The vat's curved sides were wrought of what looked like the same black stone as the outer walls of the Keep, but within-the Icefalcon climbed cautiously to the wagon-bed to see-it was lined with silvery glass, and like fragments of twig and leaf caught in ice, there seemed to be transparent crystals, shards of iron, and tiny spheres of amber and obsidian embedded in the darkly shimmering inner layer.

A canopy of three linked half arches surmounted it, intertwined metal and glass-two men were taking them down now. They wore boots and moved with more intelligence and purpose than did the clones, and packed the apparatus carefully into great wooden crates, stuffing in wadding of dry grass, wool, crumpled parchments, and rags of linen and rawhide.

At their apex the arches had been joined by a many-sided obsidian polyhedron and linked down their sides with dangling nets of what appeared to be meshed gold wire, worn thin and tattered, and woven with more spheres of glass and amber.

Two more polyhedrons, glass or crystal, tentacled in gold tubes and set on wooden plinths-the plinths were raw-new-stood at the opposite end of the tub. One of the booted warriors boxed them up as the Icefalcon watched.

To the Icefalcon's spirit sight, the whole of the apparatus shimmered with magic, and he understood why Cold Death spoke of it with uneasiness and fear.

There were petcocks and drains on the vat, and the straw underneath them, sodden and stinking, was being cleared away. Sockets, too, made dark little mouths in the corners of the vat to accommodate what looked like poles with ingeniously geared crank-wheels, but these had already been dismantled.

Where had they had gotten all of this? the Icefalcon wondered. And how had it survived the centuries-decades of centuries, Gil said-since the Times Before?

Hidden away, as Gil and Maia had said?

It looked built to last, like all the possessions of the mud-diggers, who could not abide the thought of anything they owned passing into dust.

In the lower part of the tent, on the straw and rough carpets of the floor, the Truth-Finder was packing up a little box. Coming near, the Icefalcon saw that it contained needles made of crystal, dozens of them, each with a bead on its head: amber, iron, crystal, black stone.

White Mustaches, whom Vair greeted as Nargois, came into the tent and asked a question in which the Icefalcon recognized the words for corpses-only Vair used the word carcasses, the bodies of animals and barbarians. Nargois assented, and Vair seemed pleased.

Nargois asked something about the Keep of Dare, and Vair shrugged as he replied. Though he knew of it-how not?-the siege was clearly not a matter that deeply concerned him.

Eleven hundred men? Why not?

Blood-stench, magic, cold, and pain twisting at his mind, the Icefalcon left the tent. He saw no reason why he could not go directly through the walls, and he was right: the scrape and itch of every layer of the cheap black cloth and canvas, darkness, then the bright dry sunlight of the plains morning.

He investigated the other wagons as the men loaded them. Most contained food; one held weapons.

Two were packed with clothing, heavy furs and densely quilted jackets in addition to the loose, bright-hued hand-me-down trousers and tunics worn by most of the men.

In another wagon he found crates of the type he had seen in the tent: heavy wood, draped with demon-scares, and dimly glowing with the sickish pale light that played around the apparatus in the tent.

Some other apparatus, clearly.

May their Ancestors protect the folk of the Keep if it prove as evil.

But, of course, he thought, the Ancestors of the Keep folk could not protect them. The protection lay only in Tir's memories-and it was the Icefalcon's failure that had separated Tir from them.

Outside, men were taking down the demon-scares from their poles, the last thing done before moving on.

One or two pocketed them if they thought they were unobserved. It was an easy matter for the Icefalcon to leave the camp.

So Vair had machinery from the Times Before.

And a woman who claimed to be possessed of a spirit from those times, though Gil, who was wise in many matters, considered her a fraud.

From a rise in the windswept lands, the Icefalcon watched the caravan draw away. The snapping of whips, harness leather creaking, and the ceaseless bleat of sheep pierced him, musical as the light and the smells and the terror of the demons who now, he saw, materialized from the air and drifted after the wagons like thinly glowing sharks. The cold had grown on him, crippling and exhausting, drawing him toward the unfulfilled promise of the sun's ascending disk.

Slowly he let himself drift upward, until he hung like his namesake hawk far above the smooth curves of the land. His sight could follow the trace of the trail, a grass-filled groove paler than the surrounding hills, all the way to the dark tuft of Bison Hill in the distance.

In the other direction that pale groove drove south, arrow-straight, the scuffed smudges like footprints marking Vair's previous camps. Every draw and wash and coulee formed serpentine patterns of red and sepia, silver agonizingly bright through the dust-green cottonwood and sedge.

He could see the rabbits in the brush, the fishlike glowing sinuosity of water elementals in the stream. He was aware of the Empty Lakes People, riding in all directions still, scattered and broken after their defeat and going back to their hunting trails, telling themselves they were fools who followed fools when mammoth and uintatheria roved the draws.

And below him, on the flank of one rolling hill, he saw a single rider, sitting a single gray horse.

She watched the wagons also, no expression on her fire-scarred face. A big woman, rawboned and heavy-muscled, shoulders as wide as a man's under a tunic of wolfskin, a shirt of mammoth wool she'd woven herself on a walking-loom, for who can trust another's luck and goodwill in something that will abide against one's skin?

Somehow he could recognize her, as even from this height he could count the black spots on prairie hens.

A harsh face, with mocking pale eyes, framed in hair that was white where the fire scars ran up under it.

She sat at ease, her hands resting on her thighs, and when next the Icefalcon looked she was gone.

Blue Child.

Lover of Dove in the Sun, who had died on a hunting raid under his command.

Usurper of his birthright, who had branded him a coward and pulled darkness over the last year of old Noon's life.

Engineer of a hoax upon their mutual Ancestors that could have cost all the people dearly through the winter.

And warchief of the Talking Stars People.

Some day, thought the Icefalcon, and I think the day will be soon, there will be a reckoning between us.

The sun called to him, climbing in its splendor at noon. But the air seethed with demons, smoky forms invisible in the dazzle, and he would be a fool, he thought, to challenge them. So he sought the earth again, and the warm cave under the cut bank, where Cold Death sat beside his body, murmuring spells to keep demons and death at bay.