Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) (9 page)

She added, a little more loudly, “He’s such a great wizard, he can keep all those nasties at bay, sweeting. They won’t be coming near to the camp, just you see. Now come.” She drew him toward the fire, opposite where Bektis had resumed his seat. “Have yourself a bite to eat, and roll up and sleep. It’s been a rough day on you, so it has.”

She meant to be kind, so Tir didn’t say anything and
tried to eat a little of the meat and potatoes she offered him. But his stomach hurt so much with fear he could barely choke down a mouthful, and he shook his head at the rest. When he lay down in her blankets next to her, with the swarthy guards keeping watch, he could still hear the
hrush
of huge bodies slipping through the grass, the thick heavy pant of breath. Could smell, mingled with the earth smell and rain smell and new spring grasses, the rank carnivore stink. All these interlaced with the clucking of the stream in the gully and lent a horror to dreams in which Rudy’s death—over and over, struck by lightning, endlessly falling from the jutting rocks into blackness—alternated with the slow flood of still darker blackness spreading to cover the wizards’ flares, to cover them all.

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

On the third day out from Sarda Pass, Bektis and his party were attacked by a scouting band from the Empty Lakes People.

This didn’t surprise the Icefalcon. He had never rated the intelligence of the Empty Lakes People much higher than that of the average prairie dog.

He had overtaken Bektis around noon of the second day, though the wizard was not aware of the fact. Sometimes the Icefalcon trailed them north of the road, sometimes south, taking advantage of the gullies that scored this land and the low clumps of rabbitbrush and juniper that lifted above the waving green lake of grass.

The three black warriors, he saw, carried heavy packs—blankets and provisions for many days—bad news given his own need to hunt as he went. When they halted for nooning, he briefly considered helping himself to their stores but gave up the idea at once. Like most of the warriors of the Real World, he carried talismans to give him at least some protection against the illusions—and the scrying abilities—of Wise Ones, but such amulets were only as good as the shaman who wrought them, and he suspected Bektis would be able to see through such wards without much trouble if he had any suspicion that there was a reason to look. Even could he slip past whatever guardian-wards Bektis might put around the camp, the mere fact of the thefts would alert them that they were being watched, and with a Wise One in the party this was far too dangerous to permit. He was eking out his small
supplies of meat and fish with the roots of last autumn’s water plantains and cattails, but even they took time to gather and prepare, and he could feel hunger gaining on him.

Toward sunset of the second day they left the road and turned north to Bison Hill, a mound in the midst of the prairie covered with elder and cottonwood and used by travelers as a campsite—and by bandits as a handy place to find travelers—since time immemorial. Deer grazed in the woods, as did the small swift antelope of the plains.

He worked his way up to the knoll through stream cuts and bison wallows and under cover of the long prairie grass, making a mental note to speak to Janus about changing the clothing of the Guards from their traditional black to the colors of the earth. From a thicket of wild grapes some distance back he watched Hethya and one of the three black warriors—
clones
, Gil had called them, meaning identical people who were presumably common to her world—unload the donkeys while Bektis built a fire at the edge of the shelter of the trees.

Only an idiot or a Wise One would build a fire in such a place, where anyone could take advantage of the cover to come up on them, even as the Icefalcon was doing. But he supposed that with the advantage of wizardry it was possible to remain comfortably out of the wind and not worry about who or what might be deeper in the woods. Any of the Talking Stars People would have camped some distance from the knoll, where they could see in all directions, even had they had a Wise One in their company.

There was never a guarantee that some other war band wouldn’t include a shaman more Wise than one’s own.

“I can help you,” said Tir, as Hethya lifted him down from the donkey. “I promise I won’t run away.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but with a friendliness in his voice that told the Icefalcon that this woman must have used him kindly over the past day and a half. Indeed, the woman’s face was not cruel, and by the way she patted Tir on the
shoulder, and the closeness between them as they stood, it was clear that she was used to children and liked them.

She glanced now over at Bektis, who was ordering the warriors about placing the blankets. It was the closest the Icefalcon had been to them—less than a hundred feet—and he studied the weapon of crystal and gold on the sorcerer’s hand with wary interest. A device of similar workmanship around Bektis’ neck, a high collar fitted up close under the ears, was visible only briefly when the wizard pushed down the furred hood of his coat and tried to untangle his beard.

“I think best not, sweeting,” Hethya said in a voice so low the Icefalcon had to guess at some of the words. “But thank you; ’tis kind of you thinking of it.” She ruffled his hair again. “Sit you down there under the tree a bit. We’ll be having supper soon, and I’ll untie you to eat. Are you tired?”

Tir shook his head, though he looked beaten with weariness. He followed her, his hands still bound behind his back—the Icefalcon could see where his wrists were bandaged under the thongs—while she unshipped a little nest of cook pots. “Does Oale Niu just tell you things?” he asked her as she worked. “Or do you see things, or smell them sometimes, and … and remember? Or think you remember but you don’t know what it is?”

“Like what, honey? Here, you, Akula,” she called out, and all three of the guards turned their heads. “One of you go fetch me water from the spring, would you?”

The men stared at her, scorn in their faces, for in the Alketch men do not take orders from women. Bektis snapped, “Do as she says,” and all started off in search of the boiled-leather pail that had hung, filled neatly with potatoes, on the second donkey’s pack saddle. Watching their aimless movements, it occurred to the Icefalcon that none of them were very bright.

“Like this.” Tir nodded toward the rolling wonderment of green beyond the scrim of birches. They had left the great slunch beds behind them, and for the most part the land was as it had been since the world’s dawn: long grass bright with
spring, widely dispersed clumps of rabbitbrush, the dark lines of treetops marking stream cuts sometimes sixty feet below the level of the surrounding plain. “It smells like something … One of those other people was here once.” “Those other people” was how the boy thought about his ancestors, those memories of ancient days.

“Only it was in the winter, I think,” went on Tir softly. “Everything was brown. Did Oale Niu come here?”

“She did that.” Hethya settled back on her hunkers, and her voice changed again, slowed and deepened, as she said, “I was here. Twelve of us rode down from the flanks of Anthir mountain. The mages ringed our camp with a circle of flames to keep the Dark Ones at bay.”

Tir frowned. Even from this distance, the Icefalcon saw in the set of his shoulders, the stance of his compact body, the memory of distant things. “He was here with his daddy,” he said, so softly the Icefalcon almost could not make out the words. “His daddy knew the way. The road was that way, north toward the mountains, by those little hills.”

Two of the warriors came back with water; Bektis gave them very exact instructions about mounting guard on the camp, things that to the Icefalcon seemed obvious. The Icefalcon slipped back among the trees, carefully picking hard and sheltered ground, and crawled snakewise on his belly through the grass to the bison wallow that he knew from other days lay just south of the road. Bandits—or more likely the Empty Lakes People, whose spirit wands he had seen twice in these lands—would be along in the morning.

And they were.

The Empty Lakes People didn’t attack until nearly noon, but the Icefalcon was aware of them when they came up the coulee to the northwest as a redstart and a raven flew out of the trees. They waited there for a time, for the party in the grove to pack up and move on.

When Bektis and his group didn’t pack up, but rather collected more firewood and water, like people who planned to remain where they were for the day, the Empty Lakes
People—being the Empty Lakes People—decided that the thing to do was attack rather than make a closer observation of the grove, in which case they’d have seen that there was a Wise One in the party and thought again about the idea.

Or maybe not. These were the Empty Lakes People, after all.

In any case they attacked, with predictable results. The Icefalcon heard a cry from the wooded hill, and Hethya’s scream. The woman always seemed to be screaming. A man broke cover on the eastern side of the hill and ran across the road with his deer-hide jacket in flames. He fell in the long grass. Another warrior rode full-tilt out of the grove on a dun-colored mare that reared in sudden terror at something it saw but the Icefalcon didn’t.

Illusion
. There were amulets against such spookery on the mare’s bridle but clearly Bektis’ powers were greater than the amulets’ maker—and since the Dark Ones’ systematic destruction of mages, many of the talismans had outlived their effectiveness years ago. One of the black warriors pelted from the trees and grappled briefly with the warrior, dragging her down from her horse. She cried out in terror and pain, and struck at something—again illusory—in which moment the black man plunged his sword into the woman’s chest. She fell, coughing blood. A war-dog, probably hers, raced from the trees, coat blazing, crying and yipping in pain.

In the grove other shapes were running around or struggling in the trampled underbrush of wild grape and snakeweed. More barking, war-dogs terrified and confused by enchantment. Fire flashed, or perhaps only the illusion of fire.

Tir, very sensibly, climbed a tree. The Icefalcon saw the boy’s bright blue jacket sleeves among the limbs of the cottonwood under which Bektis had built last night’s fire. He was glad that someone—probably the woman Hethya—had untied Tir’s hands and hoped none of the Empty Lakes People remained in the coulee, which was just within bowshot of the hill. The boy probably knew that running away from Bektis would be a waste of time.

Bide your time, son of Eldor. Watch for your chance
.

The coyote who waits can eat the flesh of the saber-tooth who plunges ahead into a fight
.

The attack was over before the shadows had shortened the last inch or so to noon.

Leaning up on his elbows, the Icefalcon watched the three black warriors load the bodies of the slain onto the horses that remained in the grove and carry them out to the coulee to dump them. Then they returned to Bektis’ camp, tethered the captured horses, and set about gathering water and making lunch.

Thank you
, thought the Icefalcon.
Now stay put so I can eat, too
.

He crawled through the grass—noting automatically that rains had been scanty here and so the herds would not be plentiful later in the year—to the edge of the coulee, which at that point was some twenty feet deep. Even a few years before, the stream at the bottom had been wider and stronger than it was now. Barely a trickle flowed over gray and white rocks, and the sedge and cattail along its verge were thin and weak, though on the whole the bottomland that lay for thirty or forty feet on either side of the water was lusher than the prairie above. Cottonwood and lodge-pole pine made light cover from bank to waterside; lungwort, fleabane, and marigolds gemmed the grass.

The half-dozen bodies lay jumbled below in a clump of chokecherry. Their dogs had been thrown down with them, the heavy-headed, heavy-shouldered fighting brutes of the Empty Lakes People. The Icefalcon took a very cautious look around, then slithered down the bank some hundred feet from the place, which he circled twice before coming close. Carrion birds were already gathered. He wondered if Bektis would notice when they flew upward.

They settled again on the limbs of the cottonwood just above the bodies, below the line of the prairie’s edge.

There had been six in the scouting party. Five lay here, fair-skinned like all the peoples of the Real World, bronzed from the sun, their hair—flaxen or primrose or the gay hue
of marigolds—braided and dabbled with darkening blood. Four had perished of stab wounds, and one bore the same lightning burns that had marked Rudy’s face. The sixth would be the man who ran out of the grove with his shirt burning, to fall in the long grass.

The Icefalcon waited, listening, for some little time more, then moved in and made from them a selection of trousers, tunic, jacket, gloves, and cap wrought of wolf or deer hide, whose colors blended with the hues of the prairie. He changed clothes quickly and buried his black garments in a muskrat hole in the bank, piling brush to conceal where he’d driven the earth in. His weapons and harness he kept; his boots as well, for none of them had feet of his size, and boots would outlast moccasins on a long hunt.

He collected also all the food they carried, scout rations of pemmican, jerked venison and duck flesh, pine nuts, and bison and raccoon fat sweetened with maple sugar. He hung the buckskin pouches and tubes from his belt and shoulders, working fast, with one eye on the birds overhead.

When they flew up, he retreated, picking again the stoniest line of departure, which would show no mark of his boots.

Rather to his surprise he knew the man who slipped down the bank from above and stole up on the bodies, taking far fewer precautions about it than the Icefalcon considered necessary, but what could one expect from the Empty Lakes People?

It was Loses His Way.