Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 9

"Any change?"

Minalde shook her head. "I tell myself it's better that way," she whispered, though Gil suspected, looking down at the still bronze face of the man on the bed, that Rudy was beyond being waked. A single pine knot burning in an iron holder smeared gritty yellow light on the younger woman's features. With no guarantee how long the siege would last, use of torches and pine knots was kept to a minimum.

There was no need for more light in this room anyway. Ilae came in several times a day to check on her patient and renew the spells of healing, the spells of warmth that kept him from sinking into cold and death, but as a mage she could see in the dark. When Alde sat here, as she came in many times a day to do, she needed no more light than the single lamp could provide.

Even by its forgiving radiance she looked horrible, wasted and white and beaten. Gil knew she kept up a good face where others could see her. In the Keep they called her brave. Here she wept.

Rudy had been Gil's friend for seven years, since their first unfortunate meeting in the California hills. He was the final link that held her to the world they both had abandoned, the world neither ever quite forgot.

She had shed tears in this room herself.

"Look, I hate to bug you about this," she said, "but Lord Sketh will die of grief if he doesn't see you. I can tell him to get lost if you want.

Minalde shook her head and squeezed out the rag that lay soaking in a bowl of scented vinegar water to wipe down her face. "I'll have to eventually," she said. "My old nurse always told me, 'There's no sense putting off."'

She got up. When she was working-meeting with the Keep Lords, hearing the endless squabbles and quibbles that the Keep dwellers brought to her for justice, conferring with the hunters and the wardens of the hydroponics gardens about the division of food and labor-she dressed in one of several formal gowns, cut and styled after the fashion they had learned in the days of the Realm's strength to associate with dignity and authority.

She was so dressed now: train, flowing sleeves, lavish embroidered trapunto- and jewel-work patterns, though few people in the Keep knew that she took delight in making the gowns herself. The green wool looked muddy by the smoky light, the red velvet of the pillows behind her like old blood.

"We might as well get it over with." Alde readjusted the elaborate braids of her coiffure, pinned over them the veil that had been part of her trousseau, pale-green silk that fell past her hips. "I know what Lady Sketh wants."

Generally when Lord Sketh asked for an audience it was Lady Sketh's idea.

"We haven't even asked their intention," declared the tall, pearshaped man, folding his hands before the worked silver buckle of his belt. "We've made ourselves prisoners here, living like jailbirds, for nearly a week now, when the matter may be one that can be adjusted by compromise."

"Two siege engines," Minalde pointed out in her low sweet voice, "and eleven hundred men marching fully armed up the pass does not bear the appearance of compromise to me." In the cool white splendor of the glowstones that hung from wire baskets in her small conference room, she looked worse, thin and stretched, dark smudges under her eyes.

"Had they wished to parley at any time in the past week, a man could have come to the steps of the Keep and knocked on the doors. Ilae?"

She turned to the wizard in the low chair to her left. Ilae looked older, and more queenly, with her red hair braided up into a crown on her head. Maia, erstwhile Bishop of Penambra and now head of the Church in the Keep, sat at Alde's right, the position of honor.

Minalde had embroidered his formal tabard, too, as a gift on his forty-second birthday last year. The carved black chair in which Tir usually sat during his mother's audiences had been taken away.

"In my scrying crystal I see them, my Lady," said the girl, and touched the ruby tucked in the palm of her left hand. "Men with drawn swords stand guard on either side of the Keep doors. Master Wend tells me there've been fights, too, 'twixt their men and Yar's archers, and yestere'en they tried to ambush those as had tried again to get through the pass."

"Well, naturally there's been fighting," said Enas Barrelstave, who had accompanied Lord Sketh to his audience. Barrelstave was one of the wealthiest commoners in the Keep, and something of a demagogue as well.

"We meet them with a rain of arrows; our hunters are shooting at whoever gets too far from the main camp. We assumed from the beginning that their intentions were ill."

He glanced accusingly at Janus, on one side of the door that led to Alde's private chambers. Gil guarded the other, their black surcoats a silent reminder of the Guards' support. "Of course they're expecting more trouble."

"The least you can do, my Lady," said Sketh, "is arrange a parley."

"No."

"May I remind your Ladyship," said Barrelstave, "with all due respect, that perhaps his young Lordship might have a different opinion were he here to disagree?"

Cheap shot, thought Gil, angry at the not too tactful reminder that Minalde, as regent for Tir, was now nothing more than the widow of the last King, seven years dead. Without Tir, her official position was considerably weakened. I'll remember that later, pal.

Alde's jaw tightened for a moment, then she said in a pleasant, conversational tone, "Very well. Would you, Lord Sketh, or you, Master Barrelstave, like to be the one who goes outside?"

The two men looked at each other, having quite clearly envisioned someone of lesser status in the role of messenger. Still, Gil had to give them credit: faced with Put up or shut up, both volunteered, and Lord Sketh, who knew some of the ha'al tongue, was given the job.

Janus picked Melantrys as Doorkeeper for the operation. She could catch flies in her hands and had been shot at enough by bandits that whizzing arrows wouldn't bother her. Gil, Minalde, and Ilae stood just inside the inner set of Keep Doors, backed up by a sizable contingent of Guards, swords drawn and ready.

Ilae wrought two small fire-spells, placing them just between the armed warriors standing at the outer Doors-not easy to do, working at a distance with a scrying stone. The Alketch guards clearly knew there were mages in the Keep because they ran at the first flicker of flame between them.

Ilae, tongue between her teeth with concentration, put a second burst of sparks a little lower down the steps to get them to keep their distance, but whoever was in charge of the Alketch troops had evidently thought of that one because the whole area around the Keep-and every foot of ground in the camp, set far enough from the walls to make spell-casting difficult for amateurs, said Ilae-had been swept and plucked of last year's dead leaves and weeds like a king's garden on his daughter's wedding day.

On the heels of the second flame-burst Lord Sketh stepped forth, raised high the white flag of truce, and cried out in the ha'al tongue, "Parley! We beg a parley!" while at the same moment Janus slammed shut the inner Doors and twisted the locking-ring.

Gil was watching Ilae's eyes. She saw them flare wide and heard the gasp of her breath and knew Lord Sketh had been fired on or otherwise attacked in the doorway. Minalde, watching, too, said in her very clear sweet voice, "I told that imbecile."

"He's safe in," said Ilae a moment later. "Melantrys got the Doors shut."

Janus and Caldern worked the locking-rings and opened the inner Doors. Sketh and Melantrys emerged from the glowstone-lit passageway between the outer Doors and the inner, Sketh blanched and trembling with shock, Melantrys pulling a crimson-feathered arrow out of the extravagant hide flap of her boot-top.

Their feet crunched on the dry hay and tinder with which the gate-passage was heaped. Gil guessed his Lordship's pallor was due in part to fear that Ilae would get his signals wrong and prematurely ignite this last-ditch incendiary defense.

"Satisfied?" demanded Janus, who hadn't forgotten Barrelstave's imputation of warmongering.

Minalde hurried forward and took Lord Sketh's hands. "Thank you, my Lord," she said, lifting her voice just a trifle so all around the gate could hear. "That took courage, braving the enemy. So now we know."

"They never even listened," whispered Lord Sketh. He looked about to be sick. Lady Sketh hurried up, a stout blond woman almost as tall as her husband, the decoration and jewelry on her clothing making Alde look like a poor relation. "Never so much as paused. The moment I stepped forth, they started shooting, ran up the steps, swords drawn, with no intent to parley."

"Now we know," repeated Minalde, patting his hand like a sister. Janus muttered sotto voce to Gil, "Like we didn't know before. They pounding at the Doors now, Ilae, me love?"

The mage shook her head, still standing under the nearest glowstone basket, scrying stone cupped in her palm. "They didn't even come up to them. The minute they closed, they stopped."

Janus whistled through his front teeth, eyebrows raised. "So what then?" he asked. "They know there's but the one entrance. What're they waiting for? Someone inside to betray us?"

He looked around, his reddish-brown eyes questing the faces of the Guards, of Lord Sketh, of Enas Barrelstave, who stood nearby looking equal parts shaken and indignant, and Lady Sketh who, in the process of enfolding her husband in several acres of fur-lined sleeves, was careful to include Minalde in the embrace as well.

Gil was silent, a thought coming to her, but she said nothing until she and Minalde were walking back to the Royal Sector through the vast near darkness of the livestock-scented Aisle.

As they crossed the last of the railless stone bridges, turned their steps toward the laundry-hung arch of the Royal Stair, Gil said softly, "Alde, we're always hearing how the Doors are the only way into the Keep-how the Keep was built that way to be the perfect defense against the Dark Ones. Do we know those are the only doors?"

"Yes," said Minalde, startled. She stopped at the foot of the Royal Stair, plum-dark eyes wide, pinpricks of reflection swimming in them from the votive lamps of St. Prool's statue in a niche. "I mean, Eldor said ... All the records of the Keep say that it was built that way to keep the Dark Ones from entering..."

"I know," said Gil. "But we don't have records from the building of the Keep. Only traditions, and hearsay, and tales." She folded her arms and glanced back toward the Doors, where the Guards still crowded around Ilae. Men and women kept coming up to them, weavers and tub-makers and gardeners, asking questions and divesting themselves of their opinions with much arm waving and jostling.

"Are we sure there's no other way in? Because those people outside the gate sure act like they think there is."

"It's nothing to worry about." Bektis carefully replaced his scrying ball in its bags of silk, fur, and velvet, folded up the silver tripod, and stroked his milk-white beard. "Lord Vair was delayed by a White Raider attack on his camp, that's all. They're on the road again and should be with us by sunset."

Hethya started to look around her, but the wizard said casually, "Oh, I'm sure the other two have succumbed as well." Tir looked around, too, and indeed neither of the other Akulae were in sight. But his movement caught Bektis' attention: "And what is that child doing with his hands free?"

"I took him into the woods to pee," said Hethya, eyes flashing with annoyance. "I was never more than a foot and a half from him." Under Bektis' cold glare she led Tir back to the sycamore tree where he had been tied, put his hands behind his back and bound them carefully tight, then ran through them the rawhide rope whose other end was knotted to the trunk. "Stuck-up old blowhard. Are you all right, sweeting?"

"I'm fine," said Tir, sitting down tailor-fashion and trying not to look conscious of the dagger in his boot.

"Are the other Akulae dead?"

"Looks like." Seeing the fear in his eyes, she stroked his hair and added, "It's nothing for you to worry over, honey. Nobody killed them. And they weren't..." She hesitated, searching, Tir thought, for an explanation that wouldn't explain too much.

"They weren't really people," she said at last. "They-the things they are-don't live very long, and they didn't hurt or anything when they died."

"What are they?" Tir didn't know if this information would make him feel better or worse. When Toughie, matriarch of the Guards' cats, died, his mother had comforted him by telling him that cats didn't live as long as people, which to Tir's mind was awful. The thought that there were things that looked like people but weren't people scared him, too.

He saw her eyes shift again and knew this was a secret she couldn't tell him. "Don't worry yourself with it, sweeting." She walked back to Bektis, scooping up a big handful of her curls and twisting them out of her way on top of her head with one of the jeweled bronze hairpins she carried in the pockets of her coat. She kept her voice down talking to the wizard, but by her gestures she was angry, angry and scared. She was a person who talked with her hands, and the wave of her arm at the pale-trunked cottonwoods on two sides of them, the slash of her hand across her throat, told Tir as if he'd been at her elbow what she was talking about.

White Raiders had come at them once. Bektis shook his head and made his little pooh-pooh flick with his fingers, as if brushing gnats aside, and touched the crystal device that hung by golden mesh straps at his belt.

But Tir had heard enough stories from Ingold, from Rudy, from Janus and the Icefalcon, to know that the White Raiders were still watching Bison Hill.

Their dead were rotting in the coulee away from the camp-birds hung over the place-but they wouldn't simply say, "Those people are too strong for us, let's leave them alone." White Raiders never left anyone alone.

But it wasn't the White Raiders who rode out of the southern badlands with the sinking away of day. Bektis was impatient by then, pacing around and snapping at Hethya; it was Hethya who did all the camp work. She fetched water and made food at noon, though Tir, still tethered under his tree, noticed that she didn't go far into the trees.

She brought up the horses, too, and Bektis laid spells around them: Tir thought Ingold's method of keeping horses from running away or being stolen was more efficient, but didn't say so. He noticed Bektis slipped the bright-flashing handgear of crystals on to execute the guarding-spell, and to make the fire, too, and wondered a little about it because Rudy had told him that those kinds of spells didn't take much magic.

When the light turned red-gold and the shadows grew long, Bektis walked to where the slope sank away toward the grassy prairie, the gems still on his hand, and shaded his eyes to gaze to the south. "Ah," he said, pleased. "At last."

I have to be brave, Tir told himself, watching the line of riders, the swaying dark tops of tall wagons, the double file of men with weapons glittering in the harsh dry fading light. I have to be brave.

It was an army, bigger than the biggest band of outlaws Tir had ever seen. They were all men-unlike the Guards and the bandit troops Tir had heard about-and they were mostly black-skinned, some with white hair, some with black, some bald as eggs as the Akulae had been.

Tir remembered Rudy's description of the black-skinned prince who had offered to marry his mother, back when the lands of the Alketch still had an emperor.

Remembered, too, the name of the Alketch general with a silver hook where his right hand should have been. He had betrayed the armies of daylight when they went against the Dark Ones in their Nests, pulled his men out of the fighting so that he could have his own army strong, left the men of the Keep to be killed. There were a lot of orphans in the Keep whose fathers and mothers had died there in the holocaust of fire and shadow.

The man in the long white cloak who dismounted his horse and walked up the hill to meet Bektis had such a hook, though that was not the most fearful thing about him. He had yellow eyes that did not care whether you lived or died.

"My Lord Vair." Bektis' voice had a caressing note, as if Vair were the most important person in the entire world, and he made the formal salaam that mostly only the Keep Lords made. "You have the boy?" A voice like rocks rubbing over each other. (I have to be brave) "We have him safe and sound, illustrious Lord. I behold within my scrying crystal that your forces surround the Keep of Dare."

This was a shock to Tir, another cold drench of panic. "It is well done." Lord Vair gestured impatiently. "Were you followed?" "Only as far as the crest of the pass, my Lord. The wizard Ingold not being at the Keep, they sent another of the Keep mages after me. I slew him with the lightning of my hands and buried the pass under a blizzard of snow." The final sunlight leaped and sparkled from his flourishing hand.

"Daily since then have I scried the pass. The spells I laid on it still hold strong."

"And Ingold?" His words came out like slaps in the face. His speech, though recognizably the words of the Wathe, had a different intonation, the sounds bent and changed and the accents differently placed.

"He is in Gae still."

Tir's heart sank, but he bit back tears. Those cold wolf eyes cut over toward him, measuring him as they measured all things and, as they found all things, finding him wanting.

"Demon-fornicating son of Evil. And the wench?"

"I am here, Vair na-Chandros of the Southern Realms." Hethya stepped forward, drawing herself tall.

"Anios ithbach amrdmmas a teyelsan, 'The ignorant speak easily of that which they do not under stand.' "

The sonorous words flowed from her tongue like the magic speech of wizards, and her face seemed to grow longer and thinner, a different set to the mouth than Hethya's broad grin, the hazel eyes unsparkling, cold as a priestess'. "The girl Hethya, Uranwe's Daughter, is here with me also, but I am here, I, Oale Niu; here in this place where I stood three thousand years ago, and I will not be slighted."

The men who had come up behind Lord Vair murmured among themselves, and one or two bowed their heads.

After a moment Lord Vair inclined his, just slightly, as well. "I meant no disrespect, Lady," he said. "And indeed I apologize for the clumsiness of my tongue. The apparatus you instructed us in worked well, as you see."

He signed toward the men gathered around the wagons at the foot of the slope. It was a little difficult for Tir at first because all were strangers to him, bald and without facial hair of any kind, and he was not used to the sight of so many black faces, but he realized that many of them had the same features, like the Akulae.

A word came to his mind unbidden, from the dark hollow of memory: tethyn. They were called tethyn.

And there was something awful about them-or about it-something that made him feel sick inside, something he didn't want to know.

"I trust that the other apparatus will function as well."

"How many things function as once they did, with the passage of years?" She looked him coldly up and down and spoke in the voice of Oale Niu, strange coming from Hethya's lush mouth. "Not men, certainly, nor the bodies of men. But the machines we built in the ancient days are wrought of power and adamant," she went on, as if she did not see Lord Vair's face cloud with anger. "They will do as they were made to do, my Lord. Be sure of it."

On these words she turned her back on him and strode serenely off into the woods, swallowed up by the shadows of the trees, leaving Tir alone.

Vair flicked his left hand-Tir noticed already that he kept his hooks low at his side or hidden within his sleeve or the folds of his white woolen cloak. "Set the camp. Nargois, Bektis..."

The sorcerer stepped closer, as did another man, tall like Lord Vair, extravagantly mustachioed and cloaked like him in white, his clothing adorned with ribbons and jewels of rank. "Let's see the brat."

Tir wanted to shrink back and conceal himself behind the tree but knew it wouldn't do any good.

Besides, it wasn't brave. When Vair, Nargois, and Bektis were halfway across the clearing to him he was swept by a wave of dread that this awful lord would know all about Akula's knife hidden in his boot.

He looked away, trying to breathe, and the next moment Lord Vair's iron fingers in their white leather glove had his chin in a grip like a machine, forcing his head up.

For a moment Tir looked into those honey eyes and saw in them worse things than he'd ever known in his life.

Then, very deliberately, Vair released his chin and struck him across the face, hard enough to knock him down. Tir fell, crying out with shock and pain, and the silver hooks flickered out of their concealment, catching Tir's sleeve and ripping the flesh of his shoulder underneath as they pulled him to his feet again.

Vair slapped him twice more, Tir sobbing but too terrified to cry. The hooks pulled him to his feet again and then jerked free of his sleeve, Vair's left hand grabbing his collar while the hooks on their ivory stump whipped around and slashed across his face, opening the flesh from temple to cheekbone in a single vicious swipe.

Tir screamed in pain, and Vair shook him, his head jerking back and forth, his breath strangled in the twist of his collar and his neck half broken by the man's strength. Then Vair caught the hooks in his face again, less than a finger-breadth from the corner of his eye.

"Listen to me, little boy," said that cold grating voice, and Tir, weeping in terror and feeling as if he were going to faint or wet himself, stared up into those vulpine eyes. "Do you know how easy it would be for me to pull half the flesh off your face? So that it flaps back and forth like a pancake?"

He shook him, only a gentle wobble this time, but horrible as a blow. "Or to dig out one of your eyes?

You'll only need one for the job you're going to do for me. Nod your head."

Blank with fear, Tir nodded, and felt the metal pull in his flesh. With a movement of his wrist Vair freed the hooks and shoved Tir facedown on the grass.

With his hands still tied behind him, he couldn't break his fall. His face felt as if it had puffed up to the size of his head, the air like cold metal against the pouring heat of his blood. He lay crying, not daring to look up or move or breathe. Something shoved at his chin, hard.

Above him the cold voice said, "Now kiss my boot, and tell me that you love me."

Tir had to wriggle forward on his shoulders, sobbing so hard he could barely speak. "I love you," he made himself say and kissed the leather. It was cold and smooth and smelled of wax and old blood.

Vair kicked him. "Say it so I can hear you."

"I love you." He had to do it right. He had to do it right or this man would kill him.

"Again. Bektis and Nargois want to hear, too."

"I love you!" screamed Tir, and bunched himself together, knees to his tucked-down chin, sobbing.

Vair kicked him again and walked away; Tir could hear the scrunch of his boots on the trampled grass.

"Fix that cut," he heard him say. "Then see me in the wagon."

Bektis came over, pushed him upright against the sycamore trunk, and very quickly smeared salve on Tir's face, as if the injury were somehow Tir's fault.

He pushed the edges of the two lines of cut flesh together and wrapped a bandage around Tir's head, but he worked very fast: "Stop crying," he ordered, "lest my Lord return and make you cry in good earnest."

He hastened away to the wagon. Later, when he thought about it, Tir realized Bektis must be almost as afraid of Lord Vair as he was. Now he only put the uninjured side of his face against the tree trunk and cried.

Boots crunched the grass again and Tir whirled in nauseated terror. It was Hethya, dropping to her knees beside him and gathering him in her arms. There was another man behind her, one of the black warriors, a young man as big as a tree.

"He all right, Lady?" He held out a gourd of water.

"I think so. Thank you, laddy-buck." She took the water, held Tir close against her. He buried his head against her breasts, wanting to hide himself in her body, wanting to be a baby again and be taken care of, wanting to be dead. He heard the water from the gourd drip on the grass and wondered if they'd beat him if he didn't drink it or say thank you.

"I got these." The young man's voice had the same inflection as Akula's, awkward over the tongue of the Wathe. "Dates, understand? Dates?"

He felt Hethya move, reaching, and heard the warm smile in her voice. "Thank you."

"My own father, he beat me. Bad. But not like that." There was a clumsy pause, and Tir felt the man's rough fingers touch him very gently on the hair. Then the grass crunched again as the young soldier walked away.

Tir curled himself into a ball, trying to make himself as small and impervious as an apple seed, and cried until he fell asleep.