Icefalcon’s Quest

Alwir and Bektis referred to the Icefalcon as “Lord Eldor’s Tame Barbarian” and made little jests about the things that were, to him, simply logical, like always having weapons and a day’s supply of food on his person, keeping to corners and never being where he could not immediately get out of a room. Their jokes did not offend him. Merely they informed him that they were fools, as most of the people of the straight roads were either mad or fools.

And most of them died with the coming of the Dark Ones.

Wind moved over the land, bitterly cold. Above the overcast that veiled the sky most nights now, the waning moon was a ravel of luminous wool. It had taken the Icefalcon most of a year to separate the reflexive terror about being outdoors after nightfall, developed by those who had passed through the Time of the Dark, from the reasonable wariness he had possessed before. Now he listened, identifying sounds and smells, gauging the scent of greenery and water somewhere beyond the slunch to the northwest that meant he might hunt tomorrow, measuring it against the certainty that there would be predators there as well. A small glowing thing like a detached head on two legs ran by along the top of the ditch – most slunch-born things glowed a little. A night-bird skimmed past, hunting moths.

Tir was out there in the dark, in the camp with Bektis and Hethya and those three identical black warriors.

Eldor’s son.

Eldor was not the kin of the Icefalcon’s ancestors. By the standards of the Talking Stars People, he would be considered an enemy. But he had not been. And he was the only person in Gae – the only person in all that new life the Icefalcon had lived among civilized people for four years – to whom he had spoken about why he had left the Talking Stars People and why he could not go back.

Speaking to him had made him less of an enemy. But what he would be called, the Icefalcon did not know.

The Dark Ones ringed this place.

Tir forced his eyes open, forced himself to look out past the campfire that seemed to him so pitifully inadequate; forced himself to look out into the darkness.

They aren’t really there.

He had never actually seen the Dark Ones. Not that he remembered by himself – his mother had told him they’d all gone away when he was a little baby. Sometimes in nightmares he’d be aware of them, amorphous waiting stirrings in the shadows and a smell that scared him when he smelled things like it sometimes, some of the things the women of the Keep used to clean clothing with.

He saw them now. The memory was overwhelming, like a recollection of something that had happened to him only yesterday: clouds of darkness that blotted the moon, winds that came up suddenly, seeming to blow from every direction at once, carrying on them the wet unnatural cold, the blood and ammonia stink. On this very stream bank – only the gully wasn’t this deep then, and the stream’s waters had lain closer to the surface, gurgling and glittering in the light of torches, a ring of torches – he had watched them pour across the flat prairie grass like floodwaters spreading and had felt his heart freeze with sickened horror and the knowledge that there was no escape.

They aren’t really there.

He faced out into the darkness, and the darkness was still.

The memory retreated a little. He felt weak with shock and relief.

“For the love o’ God, Bektis,” said Hethya, “let the poor tyke eat.”

She stood in the firelight, hair dark except where the reflected glare made brassy splinters in it, red mouth turned down with irritation. Bektis said, “I’m not going to risk the child running away.” He was rubbing and polishing the device that he wore over his right hand with a chamois; the great jointed encrustation of crystals and gold locked around his wrist, gemmed the back of his hand and his arm, and the knuckles of two of his fingers, with slabs and nodules of coruscant light. Polishing meticulously, obsessively, now with the leather and now with one of the several stiff brushes he took from his satchel, as if he feared that a single fleck of grease from dinner – which Hethya had cooked – would lessen its lethal power.

He had killed Rudy with it.

Tir shut his eyes.

He had killed Rudy.

When he shut his eyes he could still see his friend, his mother’s friend, the man who was the only father he’d known.

Hand lifted, the pronged crescent of the staff he bore flashing light, levin-fire showing up the crooked-nosed face, the wide dark eyes. Working magic, fighting Bektis’ spells so that he could rescue him, Tir, get him away from those people who’d somehow made him think that Rudy was with them all the way up the pass, that Rudy was there telling him it was okay to go with them.

He could still see the fake Rudy melting and changing into a black-skinned bald man, a man he’d never seen before, like those two other identical black warriors who’d come out of the woods to follow them toward the pass. Could still feel their hands on him, grabbing him when he tried to jump down from the donkey and run.

Then Rudy had been there, with Gil and the Icefalcon, witchlight showing them up among the rocks and snow and inky shadows of the pass. Rudy running, zigzagging away from the lightning bolts Bektis threw at him, straightening up to hurl fire from the head of his staff, crying out words of power.

The lightning bolt had hit him. And he’d fallen.

Tir clamped his teeth hard to keep from crying.

“Here you go, sweeting.” He heard the rustle of Hethya’s clothes – she’d changed back into trousers and a man’s tunic and coat – and smelled the scent of her, thicker and sweeter than a man’s. He smelled, too, the roasted meat and the potatoes she carried in a gourd bowl and opened his eyes.

“Please untie me,” he whispered. He wriggled his wrists a little in the rawhide bonds, trying to ease the pain. The coarse leather had blistered his skin during the day and the slightest pressure was a needle of fire.

“I’m sorry, me darling.” She picked a fragment of meat from the dish; she’d already cut it up for him. “His High-And-Mightiness seems to think you’ll run off, and then where would we all be?” She blew on the meat to cool it. Steam curled from it, white in the firelight.

“Please.” He tried not to sound scared, but panic scratched behind the shut doors in his mind. The Dark Ones coming. The wizards in the camp setting out flares, setting out what looked like stones, gray lumps woven around with tangled tentacles of iron and light. Fire columning up from them, the wizards’ faces illuminated, tattooed patterns lacing their shaved skulls and grim fear in their eyes. His father’s warriors bracing themselves with their flamethrowers and swords, and the one wizard who’d been engulfed by those rubbery tentacles, falling away from their grip only a heap of red-stained, melted, smoking bones.

It was only a memory. It had happened thousands of years ago. The Dark Ones weren’t coming back.

Hethya made a growl in her throat, glanced back at Bektis, and pushing Tir around by his shoulders, yanked the knots free of the bindings. The rawhide jerking away brought tears to his eyes, and the cold in the open cuts was excruciating.

She turned him around back. “Just till you finish eating, mind,” she said.

Tir whispered, “Thank you.”

“Not so fast, child.”

Bektis rose from his place by the fire, crossed to where Hethya sat tailor-fashion in front of Tir, Tir kneeling with the food bowl between his knees. Tir got to his feet; Hethya too. Tir tried hard to keep his voice steady. “I won’t run away. I just …” He couldn’t finish. Couldn’t tell this tall bearded man how badly it terrified him, not to have the use of his hands, not to be able to run in this place where the Dark had descended on them, this place at the far end of that blind corridor of memories.

Bektis said softly, “See that you don’t.”

The flourish of his arm, wrist, and elbow leading – like Gingume at the Keep who’d been an actor in Penambra before the Dark came – seemed to reach out, to gather in the formless prairie night.

Gold eyes flashed there. Ground mist and shadow coalesced. Something moved.

Tir’s heart stood still.

“You know what I am, don’t you, child?” murmured Bektis. “You know what I can do. I know the names of the wolfen-kind; I can summon the smilodonts from their lairs and the horrible-birds from where they nest in the rocks. At my bidding they will come.”

The camp was surrounded with them. Huge, half-unseen shaggy shapes, snuffing just out of the circle of the firelight. Elsewhere the glint of foot-long fangs. A snarl like ripping canvas. Tir glanced back again, despairingly, at the pitiful handful of flames, the three black warriors crouched beside it, staring around them into the dark with worried silver-gray eyes.

Hethya put her arms over his shoulders, pulled him to her tight. “Quit terrifyin’ the boy, you soulless hellkite.” She ruffled Tir’s hair comfortingly. “Don’t you worry, sweeting.” Bektis glared at her for silence – after hesitation she said, “Just you stay inside the camp and you’ll be well.”

Stomach churning with fright, Tir looked from her face to Bektis’ cold dark eyes, then to the lightless infinity beyond the fire’s reach. Movement still padded and sniffed in the long grass. Waiting for him. He didn’t want to – she’d kidnapped him, dragged him away here, lied to him, she was part of Bektis’ evil troupe – but he found himself clinging desperately to this woman’s arm.

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.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_dfbf3f0b-497b-5630-b1fc-1f3f2867223d)

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.