Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (37 page)

There was another rustle, sharp as the hiss of a snake.

Then two soft swift steps, a dark bulk emerging from darkness … A muffled curse, and Ingold Inglorion threw himself through the door, white hair disheveled and drawn sword flickering with pale light. He rolled under Loses
His Way’s strike and turned, panting, to stand for a moment in the doorway, facing out into the haunted abyss.

For a moment it seemed that the shadows reached out to him, surrounded him, smothering and evil …

Then it seemed that something altered, shifted, and there was only darkness again.

“Dratted plants.” Ingold turned; his voice was like flawed bronze, brown velvet, and rust, unmistakable. “To think I once liked salad. Miss Hethya—or should I say Lady Oale Niu—I do hope you have something with which to make tea.”

“It was you that I saw.” The Icefalcon pulled the thick mammoth-wool coat closer and experimentally flexed his hands. Though this part of the Keep wasn’t noticeably cold, he could not stop shivering. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again. “In the chamber with the crystal pillars—last night? The night before?”

In the dark of this place it was difficult enough to keep track of time, even without the nightmare of suffocation, cold, demons, and terror. An echo of pain remained, a phantom imprint burned in his mind. Every few minutes he would feel his own arms again, not trusting himself to believe that there was flesh over the bone.

“That was me.” Ingold dug into one of the packets of food he’d brought in his knapsack, which he and Loses His Way had retrieved from the corridor while the Icefalcon, numb, dizzy, and feeling like a piece of very old driftwood on a beach, lay staring at the ocher firelight patterns on the ceiling, blinking now and then and rejoicing obscurely in the friction of a real eyelid over a real eye. “Have a cake.”

The old man extended a potato cake to him. The Icefalcon devoured it ravenously and immediately felt queasy at the revival of digestive organs. He wasn’t about to say so, however. He was the Icefalcon—and food was food.

“You might have informed me,” said the Icefalcon, “that you’d followed us after all. Your presence would have been useful in any number of instances.”

“I’m very sure it would have been,” Ingold replied soothingly.

“I take it your interesting little accounts of the Siege of Renweth were fabricated from reports sent to you by Ilae and Wend?”

“By no means.” The wizard took a bite of dried apricot—apricots grew well in the Keep’s crypts, along with grapes, cherries, and several varieties of nuts. Other than the usual cuts and scratches gained from cross-country travel and sleeping rough, and a bandage around one hand that the Icefalcon remembered from his vision in the pillared chamber, Ingold did not seem much the worse for wear: shabby and unprepossessing as an old boot and several times tougher.

“Four days ago—which was the last time your sister spoke to me—I was in the Vale of Renweth, readying the latest of my half-dozen attempts to draw off General Gargonal’s troops long enough to let me slip through the Doors. That one succeeded, I’m pleased to say—it’s quite surprising what men will believe if you take them off guard in the middle of the afternoon. When you saw me, I was in one of the laundry rooms in the Royal Sector, specifically, the chamber Brycothis designated, or seemed to designate, as the Renweth end of what Gil refers to as a transporter.

“Surely you knew it had to be something of the kind,” he added, seeing the Icefalcon’s expression of startled enlightenment. Gil had told a number of tales that involved transporters. “Vair na-Chandros is many things, but he isn’t a fool. Of course the only reason he would take such a troublesome journey would be if he thought there was a way from here straight into Dare’s Keep. Even with the Hand of Harilómne, Bektis couldn’t have overpowered Ilae, Rudy, and Wend together, and the wards on the Arrow River Road were strong enough to have warned us of the army’s approach in spite of all Bektis might do.”

Ingold extended his hands gratefully to the fire. “I guessed as soon as Wend told me Tir had been kidnapped
that it had to be something of the sort, and Cold Death’s information only confirmed my suspicions. Vair sought such a thing at Prandhays first, didn’t he, Hethya?”

“I don’t know what he was seeking after at Prandhays.” Hethya, still sitting in the circle of Loses His Way’s arm, raised her chin from her fists. She had been staring dully at and past the cell’s obsidian wall, as if defeated or expecting punishment; there was a questioning look as she met the wizard’s bright-blue gaze.

Whatever she saw in Ingold’s eyes must have encouraged her, for she sat up a little straighter and said, “That Bektis, he went through every stick and stitch of Mother’s scrolls—dragged ’em all down and spent all the winter at ’em, the ones she’d never known the tongues of—while Vair and Bektis hauled me out of me cell every couple of days and asked me this and that, and me never knowin’ what it was they wanted to hear or what they’d do to me if they didn’t get it.”

Her nostrils flared, and she fell silent again, the twist in her lips a line of ugly memories.

“Now you speak of it, they did ask me about travel between Keeps—they asked Oale Niu, that is—and I kept sayin’ there wasn’t much, there wasn’t much. Stands to reason, you see.”

She shrugged and took another bite from the dried fruit that Ingold had passed all around. “You’d never want to get farther than you could find shelter at sunset. I would have said, ‘None at all,’ but Mother did find some pretty old scrolls of what she said looked like copies of copies of things from far, far back, talkin’ of travel, so there must have been some. You’d never have got me out.”

Her eyebrows, coppery in the glinting amber light, pulled together. “Two accounts, they was, and both of ’em full of fightin’ off the Dark with torches and wizards puttin’ up flares all round the camps, and such, though we had no way of knowin’ how far after the coming of the Dark those were written, nor who’d been at ’em and changed ’em around since. People do, you know,” she
added. “Mum found two or three times, where she’d have a tale written one way, and then another one fifty or so years later, where somebody’d changed it.”

“That,” the Icefalcon said haughtily, “is because civilized people make up so many stories to amuse themselves that they do not understand truth when they encounter it. Among my people it would not have happened.”

“Among your people all you talk of is animal tracks and the weather, I’ve heard.”

“Of a certainty.” Loses His Way looked wounded by the distaste in her voice. “How else can you know where to hunt, or what the pasturage for your horses will be, or where the game will graze did you not know where the rains have been in the spring? How can you tell which herds travel where unless you know the tracks of their leaders and where they went last spring and the spring before? And besides,” he added, “they are friends, those leaders. The herd of Broken Horn, the great rhinoceros of the Ten Muddy Streams Country, I have followed his tracks for fifteen years now. I know where he is likely to lead his people in seasons when the rain comes before the Moon of Blossoms and when it doesn’t fall in the Twisted Hills Country until after the New Moon of Fawns.”

“Be that as it may,” said Ingold, turning encouragingly to Hethya. He had experience with the peoples of the Real World once they got on the subject of weather and animal tracks.

“Be that as it may,” she said. “I cribbed pretty heavy off those travel stories, and Vair, he never could get around me.”

“And I take it,” said Ingold, his deep, scratchy voice a little dreamy, “that one of those two travel tales concerned this place.”

“Aye,” Hethya said softly. “Aye, it did that.”

Far off a man’s voice could be heard shouting nonsense words, or perhaps crying out in another tongue. Ingold lifted his head, blue eyes wary under eyelids marked with tiny, hooked, vicious scars; listening. Sorting sound from
sound, as mages did, sorting the darkness with his mind. The Icefalcon thought of those endless hallways stretching away into shadow, the chambers glimpsed in confusing dreams, rustling with lubberly vegetation that crept with demons, into which men bored stubbornly, stupidly, working their way inward, not out.

I will eat them all
.

His memory had curious gaps in it, but some images were branded into his consciousness: an old man gripping a struggling demon between his hands, grinning as he tore chunks of its glowing, plasmic pseudoflesh with his misshapen teeth and drank of its life.

The Keep was coming to life.

There was something he was forgetting. Something he’d heard. Bektis cradling blood and jewels to his breast. Prinyippos preening himself. Vair …

You think you can escape?

“I couldn’t say I’d been one of them as had left this place, see,” Hethya went on after a moment, “because I didn’t know how long after the coming of the Dark that was. And I didn’t know what Bektis knew. But Bektis already knew that this place
had
been left, for whatever reason: left standin’ empty, he said, and the people all just walked out and shut the doors behind ’em. God knows why.”

“I can guess,” said Ingold. “We came very close to it ourselves a few years ago—leaving Renweth, I mean. An ice storm killed all the stock and most of the food plants. This far north, with the Ice advancing, it was bound to happen. Or maybe there was sickness.”

The Icefalcon sat up a little, his back propped against the wall, his sword near his hand—he was never completely comfortable unless his sword was near his hand and he had a dagger where he could get to it fast—and accepted another potato cake. In the back of his mind a name tugged at him, a half-forgotten vision of a warrior and a child. “Who was the old man?”

“Zay.”
Tir looked up, a little surprised that none of them knew, none of them remembered. “His name is Zay.”

Once Hethya spoke of it, Tir recalled very clearly the caravans from the Keep of the Shadow straggling into Renweth Vale over Sarda Pass.

He didn’t remember whose memory it was. The glaciers were low on the mountains, though not as low as they were nowadays. The mountains themselves looked different, waterfalls down bare rockfaces where trees grew now. The air was very cold. He remembered how his breath—that other boy’s breath—smoked and his fingertips hurt within his gray fur gloves. He remembered how few they were, only handfuls of women and a couple of children. The men had all perished, victims of the Dark.

He did know that whoever it was who had originally seen this emigration had known that these were the people from the Keep of Tiyomis who didn’t know about Zay. He—whoever he was—could not remember all those other little boys, all those other young men, whose glimpsed recollections lurked in Tir’s mind. He, whoever he was, had been untroubled by the nightmares of acid-blood stink on the wind, the dreams of driving an ax home into another man’s helmeted skull on the field of shouting battle, the sudden terrors of attempted murders long past: a happy and thoughtless young man.

He hadn’t known about Brycothis, either.

Tir said, “Zay was like Brycothis. He was one of the wizards who raised the Keeps.”

He spoke from the shelter of Ingold’s arm, tucked beneath the old man’s mantle like a chick under its mother’s wing. Clinging to the old man, delirious with relief at the familiar smells of wood smoke and soap, of chemicals and herbs; the smells of the Keep. After the first hysterical hugging, he’d stepped back, knowing a wizard needed space to work in. But he’d clung to the old man’s robe when Ingold went out into the corridor again, down to another cell to work the spells to summon the Icefalcon back
to his body, spells that couldn’t be worked in the Silent room. He’d had to bite his lip and then his hand to keep from speaking.

At last, when Ingold rose from the Icefalcon’s side, wiping his face, Tir had whispered, “Is Rudy okay?”

“Rudy is well.” Ingold had ruffled Tir’s black hair as he said it; there was no lie in the blue eyes. “I worked a healing magic on him as soon as I entered the Keep, before coming here. He’s weak—he was badly hurt—but he will recover. The first thing he did when he woke was ask after you. Your mother is taking care of him and praying every night for your safety.”

So his mother was all right, too.

He wanted to kick Vair for lying.

No
, he thought.
He wanted to
 … There were other things, adult things, evil things, that he wanted to do to Vair. Things that frightened him, turned him sick even to consider.

He pressed his face to Ingold’s side and tried to push the thoughts away, to look aside from those dark places where others before him had looked.

Ingold was here. Everything was going to be all right.

“Brycothis told the other mages about—about entering into the Keeps,” he said after a time. “About becoming part of the heart of the Keep. Giving up their bodies, and their lives, so their magic would link the Keeps with the magic of the earth and the stars forever. Some other wizard was going to do it … Fyanin? Fy-something. But he died on the way, when the Dark attacked them at that hill where we were.

“There were a lot of Keeps,” he went on, looking from face to face of these people who surrounded him, these people he loved—even Loses His Way, who had scared him at first. “But there weren’t a lot of mages. The bad king killed them. And some of them were bad themselves. And a lot of them they couldn’t spare because they needed them to fight the Dark. But Zay rode north with … I think with Dare of Renweth … and Fyanach because Zay was
from the North, from the Valley of Shilgae, which was real rich then. They were his people. He was their guardian.”

“And they left him,” murmured Ingold. “They left him alone.”

The Icefalcon frowned. “He must have known why.”

“Must he?” Ingold widened his eyes at the young man. “Why do you say that? When someone hurts you—hurts you very badly—do you ever really derive any consolation from the knowledge that they were only acting as they felt driven to act?”