Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) Read online

  Not real. Not real. Not real.

  Disorientation, horror, cold, and the laughter of demons who’d seen it coming.

  Mind, consciousness, concentration crumpling under the blinding assault, the Icefalcon could only speak to the hazy fragments of consciousness that remained in the clone:

  “Unbolt the door behind you, then walk to that first corridor and go down it until you reach a wall.” He could barely get the words out and then dropped out of the man’s dreaming, to lie sobbing on the black stone floor while all around him the demons shrieked and bit each other with laughter and the sodden elemental rolled over onto him to see if there was anything of him it could absorb.

  Oh, get off me, you stupid wad of slime. The Icefalcon slid wearily aside. And the pack of you have my permission to sodomize one another repeatedly with splintery sticks.

  Howling with mirth, the demons manifested the ghostly echoes of splintery sticks. The Icefalcon looked away, repelled.

  He couldn’t imagine any being sufficiently stupid as to obey his bald and desperate instruction, but then, Gil frequently told him he had no imagination. Very much to his surprise, the clone got to his feet, slid back the door bolt, and ambled through the daisy chain of demons and down the corridor, to vanish around the first available corner. The Icefalcon started to repeat Rudy Solis’ favorite expression of astonishment—Well, I’ll be buggered—looked at the demons, and said instead, “My goodness me.”

  As he got to his feet the door opened.

  Hethya looked scared, but, curiously enough, considering all he’d been through, Tir only wore an expression of quiet alertness, with a trace of the inward look he got when he went fishing through the ancient darkness of other people’s memories. He whispered, “This way.” Hethya paused long enough to check the lamp—which she had almost covered with its pierced lid—and latch the door again before she followed.

  Demons frisking around him, the Icefalcon made his way down the hall to where the clone stood, facing the blank black inner wall of the Keep.

  It will hurt. I will let the pain pass through me and give it to the Watchers behind the Stars, who eat pain.

  He stepped into the man’s dreaming again, fast, and said, “Turn around, go back up this corridor and to the latched door again. Sit down outside it as you were.”

  He still lay on the floor, groggy with shock, trying hard to keep his spirit from dissipating until the pain’s echoes lessened, when the clone and its attendant pack of demons rounded the corner.

  So much, he thought, for that.

  It took him a little time, pacing the Keep’s straight black corridors, to find Tir and Hethya. Even as a shadow-walking dream, he moved as he had in his waking body, though he could stride faster than they because of his height.

  The Keep might be intact, but it was a crazy-house nevertheless, clogged with foliage, corridors and stairs blocked entirely by lichen and molds, by mushrooms colorless as dead men’s flesh and the size of newborn lambs. In some rooms light shone, curious and sickly and from no apparent source, and these rooms were choked thick with growths that then spread through corridors. In others—and not necessarily those near the outer wall of the Keep—there was no heat at all and frost coated the walls three and four inches thick, the ceilings turned to wildernesses of icicles and the floors to knee-deep mountains of cauliflower ice.

  Tir and Hethya had to turn back repeatedly, either because the corridors were clogged or because they could afford to leave no track, either in frost or leaves.

  “The Icefalcon said—in my dream he said—Rudy and Mama were still alive.” Tir’s voice was tiny, a despairing whisper of hope as they stole through the square-cornered warrens. “He said Vair was just lying. Do you think that was true? Don’t step there,” he added, pulling Hethya back from a stretch where ice sparkled in a sugary shroud. “We have to go around again.”

  “Me blueberry, I don’t know.” Hethya squeezed his too thin shoulder. Her breath was smoke in the firefly glow of their lamp. “Vair’s a born liar sure enough, but a born liar can still tell the truth, and Bektis hit your friend with enough levin-fire to stop a megathere in its tracks, and that’s a fact. Sometimes it’s best just to put it from your mind, sweetheart, and not tell yourself yes or no. Your ma may still be alive, and him just sayin’ she’s dead so you won’t try to get away back to her, but it’s a bad world, and bad things happen. Can you put it aside, tuck it up in a little box in your heart, till it’s time to find out?”

  Tir swallowed. “I can try.”

  The Icefalcon followed them until Tir, after long trial and error marked by two more dim chimes of the endless clock, found the cell he sought, a double in the far front corner of the second level, marked with Runes of Silence and reached by an inconspicuous stair whose entry was hidden by one of those tricks of shadow and perspective so dear to the mages of the Times Before. There he left them and started back the short way for the Doors, having no fear of leaving his footprints in the frost. Being only shadow himself he saw clearly in darkness, but it seemed to him, descending the hidden stair and striding quickly along the straight silent passageways, that the darkness lay somehow thicker than it had, thicker than it should.

  He paused, tingling in all his nerves. Far off, at the end of the corridor, something moved: three violet lights, not the marshfire flicker of demons, but something else. Then darkness again, and a moment later, soft and thready, a breath of a whistled tune.

  The cold that had tortured him since the shedding of his flesh redoubled, curling around the shadows of his bones and clutching tight. Not fear, he told himself, but reasonable caution made him back away and seek another route downward to the Aisle and the Doors.

  Not fear at all.

  But as he hastened along the corridor the Icefalcon heard the ghosts of demon laughter and the slow, horrible knocking that seemed to come from nowhere, a giant fist hammering the stone. Somewhere a man cried out in fear, and when he passed a wall white with frost the Icefalcon saw clumsy words scrawled in the white crystals, higher than a man could reach. There were no footprints on the frost below.

  Tir was hiding in this haunted place. The Icefalcon quickened his stride for the Aisle.

  There was torchlight there, and hemp-oil lamps. Voices echoed far less than they did in Renweth, for the sharpness of the sound was absorbed by the muck underfoot and the leathery monstrosity growing into darkness. Even the voices of enemies were a comfort after the darkness, the sight of men engaged in mundane tasks like sorting weapons and boots and blankets under the eye of their sergeants.

  As the Icefalcon watched, another clone dropped his load of cornmeal, flung up his arms, and fled away into the chamber’s vast darkness, leaping and dancing and shrieking with demon laughter. The sergeant in charge turned uncertainly toward a doorway behind whose brittle, decaying louvers the white glow of magefire burned. But in the end he hadn’t the courage to enter. From that doorway the Icefalcon heard Vair’s harsh snap of orders and the scrape and chink of metal.

  They were setting up the vat, thought the Icefalcon, and wondered what substance the generalissimo would use this time to flesh out the numbers of his creations. The Talking Stars People had gotten most of the mules.

  Not that the Icefalcon had any intention of lingering to find out. The naked cold of being bodiless had grown to a torment, and the ever-present sense of suffocation, the formless anxiety and grief, were making it harder and harder to concentrate. He felt weary and scraped, exhausted and craving sleep—Cold Death had warned him against sleep.

  It would be night outside. His mind was already charting the passageway between the two sets of Doors—cleared now of weeds—gauging the hundred feet of slick blue ice tunnel to be negotiated …

  He stepped between two clones and laid his hands on the locked inner Doors.

  And could not pass through.

  The shock was an abrupt one, almost physical. After a little practice he had moved through wood or stone or metal like a ghos
t—matters of the physical world as irrelevant to him as the pains of demons.

  But the Doors were magic. The wall in which they were set was magic, wrought long ago to forbid the passage of the Dark Ones. Probably—although he certainly meant to check it inch by inch—the whole of the outer wall of the Keep was so imbued with spells.

  As long as the Doors were shut, he was trapped.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I will eat them all!” The deep toneless shouting hammered flatly on the black walls, echoing from some remote place. “I will eat them up!”

  “What’s he saying?” Tir asked almost without sound, not sure if he understood the ha’al speech correctly. There was a goatish sound to the words, not human at all.

  Hethya turned the horn cover of the lamp just the tiniest bit, uncovering only a hole or two, enough to outline the white leathery leaves, the unspeakable shapes of the fungal horrors that crusted the snout of the fountain where it emerged from the wall.

  “He’s talking of eating everything or everybody.” The words were a bare whisper. They’d already learned that sound carried farther in the straight halls of the Keep of Shadow. “He’s gone mad, I think. It’ll be one of the clones.”

  While Tir stayed back with the lamp, Hethya edged between the obscene jungles to what had been the fountain’s basin and dipped both their water bottles full. Some of the leaves were white, others black and shiny as jewels or furred like bison, shapes barely recognizable as what had been the leaves of potatoes, or peas, or squash. “Faith, you’d think they’d die in the dark, after all these years.”

  “They grow on magic.” Tir drank gratefully from the dripping bottle she handed him. “They should have dirt and stuff to eat, too, like we do at the Keep—Lord Brig showed me, he’s in charge of the crypts—but there’s magic here, too.” He shivered, and it seemed to him that the bleached leaves moved. “The magic is still alive.”

  “Faith.” She hooked the water bottles to her belt, listening. Far off came a dull pounding, like a moron child beating on a wall, but huge and viciously strong. As she moved off Tir caught something, some anomalous shape, from the corner of his eye and turned back to look.

  For a moment there was a trick of shadow, of the movement of the lamp no doubt, where the tangled vines swung and clustered around the fountain, so that Tir’s heart stood still with terror.

  But there really wasn’t anyone there.

  Not a gleam of bald-shaved head or deep-sunk watching eyes.

  The noise he’d thought for one instant to be a soft-whistled tune was only the wind moving through the corridors.

  The thought came into his mind, You’d be happier away from the light. Happier in the dark alone.

  Tir knew he would be. Since leaving the dark warm protection of the Keep of Dare he had encountered nothing but pain and terror and grief, and he never wanted to go outdoors again.

  Still, he turned away and hurried after Hethya, and tried not to listen to what was almost a voice, whispering among the leaves in the dark.

  They had to open the Doors sometime.

  The Icefalcon stood, his whole existence a hideous wrack of anxiety, in the lambent golden shadows of the triple cell Vair had taken as his theater of operations, watching the generalissimo and his tame mage argue.

  “Savages!” Bektis’ gray velvet sleeve bellied like a wing with the theatrical indignation of his gesture. “Savages! Too stupid to consider using the apparatus for their own advantage, though of course they never could. But they don’t know that. And they’re too stupid even to try!”

  Vair regarded him narrowly across the table set up at the head of the vat. “And this is what you see, is it, sorcerer, in that scrying glass of yours? That the karnach no longer exists?”

  “My Lord, the White Raiders began dismantling it before our Doors were even sealed! They’ve smashed the luminar—broken the core rods—” His honey-flower tenor went squeaky with fury, the only time the Icefalcon had truly believed him to be a mage as Ingold was a mage, with a mage’s instincts. “What they couldn’t break they tipped into crevasses in the ice! It is gone, my Lord! Gone!”

  “And so you don’t have to put yourself in peril by attempting to retrieve it?” Vair cocked his head, primrose eyes cold. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  Bektis drew himself tall, his beard rippling with the jut of his chin. The Icefalcon noted briefly that Bektis’ beard, though waist-length and white as winter ermine, was perfectly combed and bore none of the matted and sweaty appearance of the hair and beards of Vair’s warriors. He must work at it for hours a day. Even Vair’s long gray hair, though dressed back in a ridge, looked as if he’d been through a battle. Perhaps a spell kept the wizard’s beard clean?

  “What I’m saying is truth, my Lord!”

  Vair lowered his eyes again, counting out the crystalline needles from their box. He worked deftly, moving them onto the tabletop with his single hand. The Icefalcon, his mind still charred by the memories of the clones his shadow had spoken to, could barely look at them, could barely endure remaining in this room. The doorway and the ceiling’s four corners were strung with demon-scares, which was a relief, for it was growing more and more difficult to push aside the demons and elementals that oozed through the clogged darkness and snuffed among the bleeding lichens.

  “Truth includes the fact that you turned tail quickly enough when the Raiders charged. I thought you had spells of illusion, spells of fear.”

  “Spells of illusion and fear only guarantee a battle if the enemy isn’t ready for them, Lord. The Raiders have followed us since we came onto the ice …”

  Longer than that, old man.

  “And they quite clearly have a shaman of their own.” He fussed at the gold-mesh straps that held the crystalline Device to his hand, and the Icefalcon, close to him for the first time, saw that the edges of the thing had worn the flesh into oozing blisters on wrist and fingers and also, he now saw, beneath the jeweled collar that was evidently part of the ensemble.

  He must be sleeping in it.

  Yet there was no sign of padding, no sign that he had put a bandage or wrap of any sort between his skin and the enchanted metal and stone.

  “Without the power of civilized magic, you understand, they were no match for me …”

  “But they were strong enough to frighten you?”

  “There was no point in continuing.”

  “Hear me, Bektis, Servant of Illusion.” Vair raised his head from his counting, and his voice was level, chill as iron left outside to freeze. “And hear me well. I saved you from the wrath of the Bishop Govannin for one purpose and one purpose only, that you assist me in retaking my rights to the lands of the South. You proved useless against that bitch Yori-Ezrikos in open battle, even with that precious bauble of yours.”

  Bektis clutched his jeweled hand to his breast, irrational fury blanching his face. “I would scarcely say that saving you, and twelve hundred of your men, from being slain by your wife was ‘useless,’ my Lord. Nor the knowledge I’ve given you about the weapons and Devices that may still exist, hidden in Dare’s Keep. And this bauble, as you call it, is the Hand of Harilómne, greatest of the …”

  “I don’t care if it’s the second-best festival hat of God’s Mother. Your Harilómne, for all his talk of studying the Devices of the Times Before, may have been as great a faker as yourself. I’m a patient man, Bektis. You will help me in this matter now, or you will find that my forbearance runs thin. Do you understand?”

  “You do not understand …” Bektis was still clutching at the Hand of Harilómne, trembling with rage. Then he seemed to recollect himself and lowered his eyes. “I understand, my Lord.”

  “Good.” Vair returned to sorting the needles, white-gloved fingers arranging them by crystal, iron, gold. “Now you inform me a new band of Raiders is moving up from the south. So we have little time. As soon as it grows light you will cast your illusions, make the Raiders outside the tunnel believe there is someth
ing—a stray mammoth, perhaps, or something else edible—that they must seek a good distance away. Near a crevasse, if possible, where we can gather up their bodies from the bottom. I need men, Bektis.” He pushed the last of the needles in its place, with obsessive neatness, and raised his eyes again. “Four more of the Hastroaals have died and two of the Ugals gone mad.”

  “My Lord, I warned you about mixing the flesh of the source with other things.”

  “And despite your warnings I have eighty men where I would only have had a score. To accomplish the taking of Dare’s Keep I will need as many again, and again. Have the Raiders gathered up the bodies of the slain?”

  Bektis inclined his head. “They lie in a crevasse in the ice, not far from the tunnel mouth. Not deep.” He still toyed with the Hand, stroking the smooth facets of the jewels, as if for reassurance.

  “Good. And they’ll certainly be fresh. You’re to go with Prinyippos and his party when they fetch them and retrieve any fragments of the karnach that you can find.”

  “My Lord …”

  “At dawn, Bektis.” Vair started for the door. “That’s—what? Two chimes of the clock from now?”

  Bektis inclined his head again, not looking happy. “Two chimes it is, my Lord. But …”

  Vair turned like a panther, a sudden swirling movement that startled even the Icefalcon, his left hand jerking free the curved sword at his waist. His draw was slow, the Icefalcon noted—it was hard to bring the hooks to bear to steady the scabbard—but there was trained and deadly speed as he dropped to fighting stance: “What was that?”

  Bektis had fluttered back, startled, out of the way, and only shook his head. “What was what, Lord?” His voice squeaked with panic.

  Slowly Vair straightened and walked back to the table where he had been arranging the needles.

  In their midst lay a woman’s comb, black horn set with three garnets. There was nothing in the least odd about it—Vair sheathed his sword awkwardly to pick it up—except that it had not been there before.