Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) Read online

  “Did it hurt you,” Hethya asked softly, “when the other two died? Your—your other selves?”

  A foolish question, thought the Icefalcon—they were separate people after all—but Loses His Way said, “I felt it. I … it is a loneliness. Worse I think than when Twin Daughter died, or her sister, who perished when they were only babies.”

  He looked down at her, a big generous kingly man, and oddly, no less so now, bald and shorn and stripped of the spear-point of his wit. His heart remained a king’s heart. “I feel—empty. Hollow. As if all chance of ever being whole again were gone. But of course it was gone when I … when I climbed into the vat.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  The lampflame wavered on glittering ice; the Icefalcon turned aside, guiding them, counting doorways and turnings. A great confusion filled him, horror and regret that he knew he should not feel—Loses His Way was his enemy after all. But he could not rid his mind of the clones’ dreams of agony, the only memories they possessed.

  In the darkness men’s voices called out distantly, footsteps thudded far off; someone cried out in horror, cut short. Like a breath of wind a low laugh seemed to hover on the edge of hearing.

  “Not really. Just … like a beating in childhood. I don’t …” Loses His Way turned, sword in his hand, listening, but only silence breathed from the choked passageway to their left, the wilderness of stalactites and wrinkled frost-mounds to their right. “I don’t remember. Is all well with you, my friend?”

  The Icefalcon opened his mouth indignantly to disclaim friendship with any member of the Empty Lakes People but said instead, “All is well.” He had a slash through his coat, but the tough mammoth-hide had taken the force of the cut, which had not penetrated to the skin. His face smarted from the claws of the demons, and he felt cold to the marrow of his bones.

  “What now?” asked Hethya as they climbed the last long stair.

  “The transporter must be guarded,” said the Icefalcon. “No magic will work in that chamber, so even if Bektis returns you will have little to fear. They so wrought it that one man outside could defend the vestibule from an army arriving by transporter—and of course any similar defense in the Keep of Dare has long since been taken out by those silly laundresses who have the rooms now. But such defenses work the other way as well. Vair may have men there already, but with luck they won’t realize Loses His Way is anything but some White Alketch clone until it’s too late.”

  Loses His Way grinned. “Now this,” he said, “this sounds like good hunting. I and my other selves, we will need to split our tally of enemies killed when we come before the ki of battle,” he explained to Hethya. “Naturally I need to kill a good many more, and an army coming at me through a single door … Ah!”

  “I couldn’t help but be noticing,” said Hethya, “about this ‘you will have little to fear.’ And just where does this you come out of, me lanky boy?”

  “It comes out of one of us having to find Ingold and find him quickly,” retorted the Icefalcon. “He must have told someone at the Keep of Vair’s intention, so if worse came to the worst they will not be taken completely unawares, but without Ingold we cannot warn them, by transporter or by other means. The boy Tir may recall something of where he might be, something of this Keep.”

  They reached the last turning of the corridor. Darkness stretched all around them, waiting. Somewhere the Icefalcon could hear Zay whistling, that maddening, haunting tune. On the floor before him glinted a handful of jewels, a woman’s headdress and rings, pale-green jewels whose heart glinted black as mile-deep ice. Whose?

  Stepping around them, he counted out fourteen of his long strides, picking by touch the pattern of lichen and molds on the wall, familiar now.

  “We are here, Scarface; we’ve sent an envoy to the Empty Lakes People. Now we need …”

  He stepped into the little room and stopped.

  Tir was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Tir waited a long time.

  Far off he could hear the voices of men calling and the ghostly chiming of the clock. These didn’t frighten him the way the whispering did, endlessly telling over in darkness the names of people whose faces Tir remembered but whom he’d never met. The voice was tiny, but it was right there in the room with him, like a worm-stuffed rat crouching in the corner.

  Sometimes the voice said other things to him, too. Things about what Vair would do to him when he caught him. Things about his mother beating him for being stupid when he got back to the Keep. Things about Hethya and the Icefalcon being dead.

  It was illusion and Tir tried to ignore it, but time stretched out, and it might have been true. Vair was out there, and the image of the Icefalcon’s body—cold asleep, as he had been when Hethya and Loses His Way brought him in—would not leave his mind. He loved Hethya, and since everything and everybody else he loved had been taken away from him, why not her, too?

  Curiously, he knew exactly where Ingold was. He didn’t know whether this was something he remembered or something the Keep told him, but he knew where he was and how to get there. After Renweth, the Keep of the Shadow was ridiculously easy to navigate, or would be except for the vines.

  It was just that he had an idea of what the place was and didn’t want to go there.

  The Icefalcon had said, Wait.

  Tir drank a little water from the bottle at his belt and waited, trying to shut the voice from his ears.

  But there was something wrong with the room. It seemed smaller than it had a few minutes—but how many minutes?—ago. The crinkly mats of fungus on one wall, the blobby lichens on the ceiling, appeared thicker in the tiny flare of the lamp, and it seemed to him that they’d begun, ever so slightly, to pulse. And there was something he couldn’t see moving in the corners.

  There was another place that was safer.

  Safe forever, within enclosing walls, where he’d never have to go outside again. Wind and sunlight and open air tangled with the images of Vair’s hand and Vair’s voice, and the terror that other boy had felt in the open—waiting in the circle of the wagons for the Dark Ones to come—merged with the gnashing onslaught of pain and grief and guilt and dread.

  Darkness safe and still. Darkness where nobody could get to him again, nobody could hurt him, ever. Darkness warm within these walls.

  The Icefalcon and Hethya and Loses His Way were dead—he had a horrible dream-vision of the chieftain dying on the threshold of the Doors, gasping for breath that would not come, a hatchet stuck bloody in his back. They were never coming back for him.

  And that was all his fault, too.

  Only Vair would come. Any minute. Any minute.

  Unless he got out fast.

  “Huh. I thought White Raiders were supposed to be able to track fish through water.” Hethya folded her arms and contemplated the black stretch of corridor, barely to be seen in the guttering flicker of the makeshift torchlight.

  “A dog of ten thousand Ancestors cannot track a ripe fish if that dog’s nose is covered.” The Icefalcon spoke without even raising himself up on his elbows, stretched full-length among the scuffed creepers, the broken mosses, a burning vinestalk held in one hand a little over his head. “Someone passed here since you and I departed to meet Loses His Way near the Aisle. But whether that someone was child or grown, woman or man, coming first and then going away or emerging from the room and fleeing, I cannot tell from these few marks in this light.”

  “Could someone have found the room?” she asked, moving after the Icefalcon as he proceeded up the hallway, snakelike on his belly, checking and studying each inch of the broken tracks through the vines. “Entered it and taken him away?”

  “Indeed someone could,” the Icefalcon replied. He spit a stray strand of his hair out of his mouth. “Whether they did or not is another matter.”

  “There was no sign of struggle.” Loses His Way appeared from the nearest crossing corridor, another vine-torch in his hand. The instincts and training of a tracker
were deep in his core; it would take more than the horror of cloning, of having his soul and self divided, to rob him of that. “The moss and fungus on the walls is thick. It would take a print easily.”

  “Were Tir a man grown I would say it pointed to his leaving of his own accord,” agreed the Icefalcon. “But a child is easily overcome. Easily fooled as well, though less so, I think, with that particular child. There.” He stopped in the crossing of another passageway, rising to his knees and holding the torch aloft. “At last. See how the stems and broken leaves lie, outward into this corridor where the floor is clear? There is no sign of someone coming inward. More, the fanned-out stems and broken leaves aren’t much. Small size and slight weight. He departed alone, of his own will, I think.”

  “Why?”

  “Thought leaves no track.” The Icefalcon crawled a few more feet, examining the floor, which in this portion of the corridor was hard black stone, unyielding of any mark. A little farther on, lichens blotched it and the walls. Tir had gone carefully, but not carefully enough.

  “There. That’s his foot.” The Icefalcon looked up. “The ceilings are high, but had a man borne that little lamp I think the smoke would have marked the fungus.” The thick, whitish growth clumped the ceiling overhead, like the wrinkled bellies of pigs. “Demons may have found him there and frightened him into leaving, but he didn’t flee in panic. See how the heel of his foot is marked as deep as the toe? He seeks something. Look how he’s tried one passageway, then turned back.”

  “And you said thought leaves no track?” Hethya scuffed along after him, amused.

  The Icefalcon raised his brows. “There is nothing here of the boy’s thought. Only what I can guess from his actions. If I saw an antelope’s track going toward Cranberry Pond, then turning so suddenly that sand was kicked up toward the pond, I would surmise that the beast smelled a dire wolf in the serviceberry thicket between the two maple trees there.” He rubbed his eyes, which burned from lack of sleep. His body ached, and the very small amount of pemmican he’d consumed from the last of Loses His Way’s stash had ceased to deliver energy a long time ago.

  “And how d’ye know it was a dire wolf and not a saber-tooth or a wee bit of a bobcat, me lanky boy?”

  “Because a family of dire wolves have hunted for twenty years among the serviceberry thickets on that side of Cranberry Pond. And what of Oale Niu?” he continued, resuming his careful quest along the passageway. “What has she to say of where the child might seek safer refuge, here in the Keep of Night?”

  Glancing back at Hethya’s silence, he saw the woman duck her head, her rich mouth tightening ruefully in the flickering torchlight. “Oale Niu would say,” she said, “that Tir’s headed inward to the heart of the Keep. That would be my guess, anyway. Everything me mother learned of the Keeps seems to indicate that places where power centered seemed to lie in a sort of pattern throughout but centered on the midline in the middle third. And the center of the Keep’s pattern was the heart of the Keep.”

  The Icefalcon nodded. “The laundry rooms in Renweth—which is where the transporter lies—are on the midline,” he said. “And the chambers where Tir hid lay at the corners. It makes sense.”

  He got to his feet, wiping some of the muck from his hands on his wolfskin tunic, and moved carefully on. Tracking by the dim flutter of the torchlight was giving him a headache—even moonlight would have been preferable, being more stable. But Noon always said that the times when one’s life depended most on tracking, the light was usually bad.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to deal with Oale Niu anymore,” sighed Hethya. “She was such a stick.”

  “She served her purpose.” The Icefalcon never thought he’d achieve tolerance for what this woman had done, but he found he could not dislike her. “And you did her well.”

  “She was me Aunt Flory.” Hethya laughed a little, drew herself up to the posture associated with the mage of ancient times, and intoned, “Unless that girl is made to wear a corset, Uranwë, she will have no better posture than a peasant. ‘A tree may be bent by a child, if the child but bend a twig.’ Uranwë was me mother,” she added, a little sad. “I always pictured Oale Niu in me mind with Flory’s face, and the way Flory did up her hair, in a lot of loops round her ears.”

  She paused, seeing the Icefalcon’s raised brows, and explained, “It helps to picture someone you’re tellin’ a tale of. It makes for a better tale.”

  “I have never understood,” said the Icefalcon, exasperated, “why civilized people wish to make a ‘better’ tale of something which is not true. It is useful to tell lies to one’s enemies, but civilized people make a virtue of falsehood.”

  “Ah, it’s not a falsehood, me lad,” she sighed. “ ’Tis an art, like singin’ or dancin’, for the joy of the thing, and the beauty alone. And there’s times when it’s more. Sometimes when a person’s in grief or in pain, that beauty’ll carry ’em through until the pain gets less and they can go on. And sometimes when their mind is goin’ in a circle of rage or hurt, they can find rest in some image, some way the words gyre, until they can think clearer and find a way through.”

  Gil returned to his mind, the intensity of her blue eyes in the glowing magelight as she wove her tales of men who could fly through the air and princesses who led armies through starry darkness to victory with the help of farm-boys and smugglers and men wrought of metal and wire. Rudy, he recalled, had told a tale once, of a king stranded for twenty years on a desert island inhabited by two magical spirits and of the man who came to find him and fell in love with his daughter. “Cool, punk,” Gil had said. “I didn’t know you’d ever read The Tempest.” “What tempest?” Rudy had replied, startled. “I’m talking about Forbidden Planet.”

  A drift of voices sounded in the darkness, soft at first but growing nearer. There was a cell several yards up the corridor whose door still partially survived; the Icefalcon indicated bare patches in the floor, and in three tiptoeing leaps made it to the place. Hethya followed so clumsily he wanted to strangle her—any competent enemy could have read her tracks—with Loses His Way helping her over the longest jump.

  Fortunately, the voices belonged to clones, hacking free and gathering into blankets all the vines, all the lichens, all the monstrous, deformed toadstools that they could from the corridor. The Icefalcon cursed as they casually obliterated all trace of the child’s tracks. He would be hours picking up the trail again.

  Beside him Hethya whispered, “What are they doing? They can’t be going to eat that stuff.”

  He clapped his hand over her mouth—the woman would talk through the ruin of the world—and waited until the clones finished their harvest and staggered trying to balance their torches with the unwieldy loads.

  “No,” breathed the Icefalcon. “Bektis has returned and informed Vair that there will be no fodder for his black vat.”

  “Then I succeeded.” Loses His Way’s blue eyes shone in the tiny seed of the surviving matchlight. He shut them then for a moment, breathing deep, remembering past the nightmare wall of pain. “It was not in vain.”

  “But he’s gatherin’ up that garbage naytheless.”

  “This is Vair we speak of,” the Icefalcon pointed out. “He will have his men, and he will have them soon. He knows his time is short. I think, my enemies, that we must give over our hunt for Tir, at least until we hold the transporter chamber. Then I will return to this place and take up the hunt again.”

  “The trail will be cold,” Loses His Way warned.

  The Icefalcon gestured at the mess of scraps and shards the three clones had left. “It cannot possibly be colder than it is now, and it may be that the delay will cost us the Keep of Dare. Come. The scout who found the place said it was roundabout to avoid the vines that grow in that whole part of the Keep. It will take us some little time to find.”

  In the event, it did not take him as long to locate as he feared it might, though over the next two hours Hethya had a good deal to say concerning the parentage
and eventual destinies of Vair na-Chandros, the Icefalcon himself, and the builders of the Keep of the Shadow. The explanatory gestures of the scout when talking to Vair had indicated, as such gestures subconsciously do, not only the manner but the direction of his search, and the scout himself had taken not the slightest precaution to cover his own tracks, those of the two demon-led clones who’d first discovered the place, or those of the three guards Vair had subsequently dispatched to keep watch in the room. It was easy not only to find the place once they cut the man’s trail but to determine how many guards were there.

  The fact that Vair needed all his nonclone warriors for other things helped, too. None of those on guard so much as questioned when Loses His Way—bald and beardless and clothed pretty much like everyone else in Vair’s party—entered, greeted them with grunts, and killed two of them before any realized what was going on. By that time the Icefalcon and Hethya were through the narrow door and it was all over.

  “Trust Vair, the bastard, not to provide the poor souls with a bite to eat on duty,” sighed Hethya after searching the bodies. “Not that I didn’t appreciate the pemmican back a while ago, me dear …” She flashed a quick grin at Loses His Way. “Just that it’s worn off, if you take my meaning. Me mother would tell me to be glad I’d had that, and stop complaining.”

  “That,” said the Icefalcon, hauling the clones over into a corner, where they could not be seen from the vestibule, “was said by the Ancestor of All Mothers to the first child born in the world. Personally, I derive little consolation from the knowledge that I have been hungrier in my life.”

  He moved along the walls of each chamber in succession, torch in hand, examining the place as a wolf would examine a trap. It was as he had seen it in his shadow state, a succession of four chambers, each smaller than the last, dwindling in length in accordance with what he vaguely recognized as some mathematical ratio and connected by open archways flanked with pillars of what appeared to be frosted glass. The last chamber of the four was noticeably colder than the other three, and there was a smell there, curious and disturbing, that he could not identify but that made his flesh creep on his bones. He walked quickly out of it, back to the small watch fire where Hethya and Loses His Way awaited him, and looked back over his shoulder two or three times, troubled by the impression that when he did so he would see nothing but darkness at his back.