Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) Page 21

  Strange, thought the Icefalcon, to see her again, face-to-face.

  She did not seem aware of the shadow-walker keeping pace with her over the hard granular snow. She picked the way for her warriors masterfully, out of sight and out of the wind. Her face, like theirs, was greased thickly and wrapped to the eyes in a scarf of knitted mammoth wool stiff with the ice of her breath; all that he could see of her indeed were her eyes. Sky-blue, cold, and suspicious always, demanding of herself the perfection that the Icefalcon had always sought; they hadn’t changed. She was a heavy-muscled woman and a tall one, acid scars of battle with the Dark Ones adding to the marks of the old burns. She would be difficult to defeat, thought the Icefalcon, when he issued his challenge—which she must accept if he backed it by the word of Loses His Way. He had been training hard, but she had been living hard, surviving in a world colder and crueler than the world of the Keep.

  Leading the people who should have been his to lead.

  “I think you don’t want me to go because you want to keep me back,” Dove in the Sun said to her—he could still hear the girl’s voice and see the anger in those sapphire-bright eyes. “You think I’ll be a warrior to match you. You’re jealous of your standing.”

  “I’m not jealous.” Blue Child’s harsh voice was calm. The Dove was the only person in the steadings she’d let talk back to her. “You’re too young. You’re not strong enough to survive a fight, or an injury. Not quick enough, and not hard enough.”

  Her eyes had gone past the girl—pretty as a fox kit and as fierce—to the Icefalcon, her rival, watching from the corner by the sod-roofed longhouse of Noon’s family, and she’d added, “And don’t you let her talk you into taking her, either. She’s not ready.”

  But of course he had. The Dove could talk anyone into anything. Except Blue Child.

  Had it been because he loved her? Or because he was angry at Blue Child, who already clearly saw herself as Noon’s heir? And for whose sake was the anger—the Dove’s or his own?

  But in any case, he thought, moving off up the rime-ice on the dune, marveling still that in his shadowy state he left no tracks, it was not his doing that the Dove was killed. She had been speared, she had not the strength to keep her horse from panicking, and both had fallen. And that was all.

  But it was he who had had to tell Blue Child that her lover was dead.

  Demons floated, whispering, all around the camp.

  More of them, now, a dirty brown beating in the air. Sometimes only the glister of disembodied eyes, the dripping sheen of fangs. Mouths that tore at him, hissed—lights that jigged insanely over the snow.

  That sly fire peered from the eyes of at least eight of the clones in the camp. Two of them wore demon-scares. One, seeing the Icefalcon—or the demon within it seeing him—pointed straight at him and ran toward him, screaming and pointing and giggling. But two of the booted guards brought up their crossbows and shot the demon soldier, and the demon rolled forth from the man’s mouth with the coughed blood of his collapsing lungs.

  It mauled and tore at the Icefalcon for a moment, but experience had shown him how to put aside at least some of the pain, how to shut his mind against it. The thing spat at him and reviled him in Noon’s voice and went its way.

  The Icefalcon moved on, shaky with shock, with the fear and cold that were inescapable in the shadow state. The light was thinning away, fogs and steam drifting between the wagons from the ice mountain where the Dark Lightning still bored rendered all things strange and flat. When he passed the place where the clones’ bodies were piled—more had died during the day, though they were only a few days old—he saw that the bodies, stripped of their clothing, were piebald, skin like human skin in places, in others strangely textured, rough and granular, or covered with a fine fuzz of grayish wool.

  He found the wagon where Tir slept, set in the midst of the camp.

  There would be confusion when the Earthsnake People attacked later in the night. He ghosted from wagon to wagon, estimating distances, terrain, and what the lighting would be like in torch-flare and darkness. Judging where the Earthsnake People would make their attack and where the Talking Stars People would. Where he could make his entrance to the camp from the crevasses beyond—bundled in coats of bison and mammoth fur, one man looked much like another. Once back in his own body, the body that now slept in the ice-cave they’d dug last night, he’d be able to …

  The hissing of the Dark Lightning ceased. Clones slopped, shivering, into the tunnel with leather buckets—a huge slab of clear ice marked the dumping area of the meltwater they carried out.

  Someone said, “Bring the boy.”

  “And fetch me a tisane, for God’s sake!” Bektis called from the metal cage of the Dark Lightning’s cradle. He was heavily wrapped in his long coat, his head protected by a series of embroidered caps, scarves, and a hood. On the refugee train from Gae to Renweth after the city’s destruction by the Dark Ones, Bektis’ collection of warm garments and muffs had been a source of never-ending derision among the Guards. The Icefalcon wondered what these southern warriors had to say about him when Vair na-Chandros wasn’t there to hear.

  More voices in the tunnel, and churning in the fog that filled it. Bektis had the air of a man at rest and would, the Icefalcon was certain, be occupied with his tisane for some time to come; he wasn’t sure whether the dark flicker of the machine’s beams would harm him, though it wasn’t anything he cared to put to the test.

  He stepped into the tunnel’s fog.

  The walls were slick ice, melted and frozen hard again, and blue as sapphire. The floor slanted downward, straight as if ruled, vanishing into dense fog and darkness. The ceiling dripped with water condensed from the steam, and the clones hurried past, water steaming and sloshing from the buckets they bore. Gil had described such a place in the heart of the Saycotl Xyam, the cursed mountain in the South, and the Icefalcon wondered if Vair na-Chandros sought here the same kinds of demons that had dwelled in those terrible caves.

  Vair and Nargois strode past him in the mist, torches haloed in woolly yellow light; Hethya walked behind “Can you see it?” Vair called out.

  Fog hid them, but for fidgeting shapes in the saturated ocher glow.

  “There, me Lord. Look where the runes catch the light. We give it another burst, a short little one—a foot, maybe.”

  “Don’t be absurd, woman, we’ll destroy them and then where will we be?”

  “For sure your Bektis has never cooked, then. You can tamper with the heat, surely. It’s a thing he operates with his mind, after all. Can’t he be stopping at a foot?”

  A warrior emerged from the choking brume, reflections from his torch frolicking through the mirror-smooth walls as if an army of lamp-bearing demons ran through the ice on either side. Hethya followed him, and Lord Vair, their breaths visible in the cold that flowed down into the tunnel from without. Hethya’s round, jovial face had thinned with the journey across the Ice, and there were smudges of weariness below her eyes. Vair looked like a snake mummified in pitch.

  The Icefalcon hesitated, looking back into the dripping vapors, then turned and followed them out again.

  “You call this a tisane?” Bektis waved the boiled-leather cup at a stone-faced guard. “The dishwater of a poor man’s house is stronger! If … My Lord,” he turned expressively to Vair, with the air of a man more put upon than human flesh can bear. “My Lord, might I please, please prevail upon your goodness to instruct your fool of a cook not to drown these tisanes in bergamot! They’re undrinkable, absolutely undrinkable!”

  Vair took it, tasted, and threw it in the guard’s face, adding a terse instruction in the ha’al tongue in which the Icefalcon was fairly sure he caught the word flog. To Bektis, Vair said, “Hethya claims that as a sorcerer you should be able to shorten the beam of this apparatus with your mind.” He tapped the gold and iron of the intricate frame. It flickered with quicksilver brightness, and the Icefalcon had the renewed sensation that it was a living
thing, attentive, waiting to hunt again.

  “We can see it through the ice,” explained Hethya. “I’d say a foot of ice, not more. Melt it off within an inch or two and we can go after it with hammers.”

  Bektis looked momentarily nonplussed.

  “The beams won’t hurt it.” Tir stood beside the Dark Lightning’s cradle, flanked by two guards, bruised face white and pinched around huge, hollowed eyes. His voice sounded distant, as if he slipped for a moment into some faraway dream. “Nothing will hurt it.”

  “Pray your recollection is correct, boy,” said Vair, and Tir shivered, the movement of his eyes to the big man’s face saying everything about what the past month had been like. “Can you do this, sorcerer?”

  “Of a certainty, my illustrious Lord.” Bektis drew himself up with an air of injury not noticeable prior to Tir’s reassurance that whatever lay within the Ice would not be damaged by Bektis’ miscalculation. “A foot, you said?” He stroked his beard, the huge crystals on his hand shining among the niveous river of silk. “Perhaps it would be best to touch it with the beams to a distance of ten inches or so and have the men remove the final few inches with hammers.” He nodded grave approval of his own wisdom. “I believe that would be best.”

  Hethya rolled her eyes.

  Bektis drew a few deep breaths, as if collecting his strength for some mighty effort, then with dramatic suddenness spread his hands. The crystals flashed in the last pastel whispers of daylight. With disembodied eyes, the Icefalcon saw the cold blue energies that came flickering out of the ice from unknown depths, saw the crystals in the iron nets stream with sparks as they drew in the forces of the air—heard, too, a kind of dry, crinkling glitter, like galaxies of suspended needles brushed by wind.

  Bektis shut his eyes—If he thought he could get away with crying “Abracadabra” like a street-conjurer, he’d do it, reflected the Icefalcon—and laid his hands on the bubble-thin ball of iridescent glass that seemed to be the apparatus’ heart …

  The Icefalcon saw the energies flash and change. With a vibration that tore at his nerves, he felt the beam of darkness lance out, a touch, a breath; a hissing deep within the tunnel, white light glaring in the clouds of mist, and steam rolled out, a dragon’s sneeze. Then Hethya took a torch from a guard and strode down into the mists, and, at Vair’s signal, the two warriors followed, axes in their hands.

  Her voice floated back, “We’ve got it!”

  Vair took Tir by the hand; the boy’s face went rigid as carved bone at the touch. Even Bektis disentangled himself from the latticed gold and iron and followed them into the luminous blue tunnel, leaving the guard who had come up at that moment with a second tisane to stand waiting, cup steaming in hand.

  Like a cat’s ghost the Icefalcon trod softly in their wake.

  The tunnel itself was close to a hundred feet long, and mist reduced visibility to inches. Voices echoed wetly; there was a dripping of water, the crunch of axes, and the thin splish of a boot in a puddle. Clones bore dripping buckets past, and though there was no perceptible sensation of heat, the air felt damper. Shapes clarified in the vapors, and the Icefalcon arrived at last at the tunnel’s end and saw what it was that Vair sought.

  Even as men chipped at the edges of the ice, white rime was forming again on what the Icefalcon could see was a pair of enormous, coal-black doors. It seemed to him that he could see, too, through the heat-cleared ice, the black wall in which they were set. It stretched away on either side, vanishing into the glacier’s green eternal midnight.

  Black wall, black door, untouched and unscathable, and underfoot, beneath a heap of ice shards and mush, the suggestion of steps leading down.

  The goal of the journey was a Keep, long ago covered over by the Ice in the North.

  “Open it, child.” Vair’s voice clanged on the diamond silence, a hammer affixing shackles, an ax striking a door.

  The Icefalcon, a wary distance from Bektis, could see Tir trembling, his breath a plume in the light of torches and magic. “They open out,” he said, his voice tiny in the stillness of watching, of awe. “If they weren’t locked from inside, it still took a wizard to open them.”

  “Lord Wizard?”

  Bektis self-consciously adjusted the crystals on his hand—the Icefalcon wondered whether the wizard had had that look of haggard thinness, of wasted flesh and waxen skin, the last time he had seen him close. He made a great flourish of his arms and a dozen graceful gyres with wrists and fingers, lights sparkling and leaping from the gems he bore. The right-hand leaf of the dark portal grated against the ice where it hadn’t been completely cleared. A shower of scrapings rained to the muck and water and refreezing slush.

  Everyone stepped back.

  The slit of darkness was like looking into the deepest heart of the earth, where the Dream Things wait forever. Bektis made another gesture, outer sleeves emphasizing his thin arms. The slit widened.

  The smell rolled forth. “Mother of Mercy!” Hethya coughed and gagged.

  Foul and green and thick as soup in the air, it seemed to clog the lungs like sewer water, a summer-smell of garbage long forgotten, borne on a rolling wave of heat that made the fog swirl and then thicken still more. At the same moment a tendril of vine dropped through the crack of darkness: gray, desiccated, bearing on it still the deformed pads of what might have been skeleton leaves, the bumpy and twisted nodules of what could, three thousand years ago, have been fruit.

  After a second of shocked stillness, Bektis sent witchlight drifting through the doors. It showed those closest the tunnel that would lead to the inner doors.

  Vair said, “Good God!”

  But what lay beyond, thought the Icefalcon, was not something that had ever been created by any god—at least by none that could by any stretch of imagination be called good.

  Like a second door behind the first, the passage was barricaded with vines. They had a shiny look in the white witchlight, like the scarred flesh of a mummy’s fingers: dried, withered, even in death tough as wires when the guards came hesitantly forward and hewed at them with their swords. They sheeted the floor and walls above an indescribable mulch underfoot of vines, leaves, and fruit from which white ferns sprouted that had never seen light, mingled with pallid fungal growths that seemed to shift and bulge with the bending of the torchlight. The inner Doors at the end of the passage stood open. Vines flowed out of the utter dark beyond like a filthy flood frozen in mid-spate, knee-deep or higher, silent, blanched, dead.

  “It’s impossible,” whispered Vair. “What plants grow without light of the sun?”

  “The Keep was reared by wizards, Lord,” said Hethya, her voice the voice of Oale Niu. Vair shot her a sidelong look, suspicious and shaken, his hand straying to the topaz demon-scare he wore. “Else why are we here?”

  Beside him, the Icefalcon heard old Nargois whisper, “Why indeed?”

  “Get some men in here.” Vair recovered his composure, glanced back at the older man. “Clear this, and have them start bringing the gear in.” He walked ahead, straight white form glimmering, boots crunching and slushing in the rotted vines. The others followed, Tir and Hethya holding hands tightly and the guards looking as if they wished they could do the same.

  Cold air seeped after them into the passageway, fog condensing like a convocation of ghosts. The ghosts drifted on their heels through the inner Doors, over the guardian tangle of vines, and into the Aisle.

  Bektis flung up his hand—jewels flashed, and witchlight drenched the darkness and hurled it to flight. “Mother of Sorrows!” Hethya cried, and made a protective sign.

  Fully the rear third of the Aisle was choked with what appeared at first, in the hard glow of the magefire, to be a single monstrous organism: bristling, feathery, colorless against the ebon walls; five levels tall to the vaulted night of the ceiling a hundred feet overhead and stirring with movement and furtive sound. But the Icefalcon saw—they all saw, with the strengthening of Bektis’ magelight—that what at first appeared to
be a homogeneous wall was in fact an impenetrable tangle of ash-hued vines that varied in thickness from the width of a child’s finger to cables greater than a man’s waist, of strange-shaped balls of fuzz and bristle that might have been leaves or spores, of pendant clots of moss that had taken on the bizarre shapes of giant fruits or carcasses hung to cure. Molds and lichens pillowed everything in a pale upholstery that glittered with moisture; weird bromeliads sprouted from them in spiderlike profusion only to play host themselves to thread-fine mazes of pale-glowing fungus.

  Arms and limbs and tributaries of this bleached jungle looped through the doorways of the cells that faced onto the Aisle and cascaded from the windows of the second and third levels; the whole of the floor was covered in stringy, wormlike tendrils. Where streams of water flowed across the floor of Dare’s Keep, here lay only crisscrossed seams of plant life, burgeoning out of the old channels like hedges and reaching all ways across black stone. When the heat spilled through those empty eyeless windows, those gaping black doorways, drawn by the bitter cold of the Doors opened after all these millennia, the vines and the molds and the bromeliads stirred and muttered with its passage, and the great soured noxium of decay surged over the men and the woman who stood, shocked speechless, in the heart of that vast internal night.

  But the Keep was whole. Thousands of tons of ice lay above its roof, pressed on its walls—had so pressed for three thousand years, as if the building lay at the bottom of a frozen sea. But the Keep was whole.

  “It is good.” Vair’s yellow eyes shone as they traveled over the cyclopean walls, the stairways that circled up through towers of openwork, the bridges spanning the Aisle, rank with hueless fern and fungus and curtained with gray stringers that reached to the floor. “Impervious, like Dare’s Keep, in which one can raise and provision an army and laugh to scorn any who come against one. It is good.”

  As if in response to his words a chime spoke, echoes resounding, musical and yet queerly atonal, with a flat deadness that gritted on the nerves. At one side of the Aisle a vast series of wheels and gears had been built into the black stone of the wall, powered by water trickling from basin to basin, the basins cracked so that the water streamed down the stone.