Icefalcon’s Quest

The Icefalcon had grown up able to differentiate between the tracks of his grandfather’s white mare Blossom Horse and those of his cousin’s mare Flirt and those of any other horse owned by anyone in the family. He had been able to recognize the prints of individual dogs, of anyone in the family or in the larger People, and of many of the members of the wild herds of reindeer, yak, bison, and mammoth as well. Tracks, and scat, and individual habits of beasts were the topic of most conversations around the longhouse fires in winter and under the summer stars while hunting in the Cursed Lands or the Night River Country. They were the heart and business of the Real World, told over the way civilized people told over Gil’s useless tales of enchantment and romance. The Icefalcon could no more have been mistaken than he could have thought that a prairie chicken’s feather belonged to a red-tailed hawk.

Three of the four bandits had wrapped their feet in the same way, and the hide wrappings were thin enough to show him that they all walked in the same fashion as well. Not just that they all toed in slightly, but that they all put their weight on their heels in the same way. Had all worn boots, the pattern of wear on the soles would have been identical.

Brothers?

No brothers he had ever encountered had been that similar.

Save for those of the bandit he had killed, all turned upstream. There was a path along the gorged mountain flank that would take them to Sarda Pass and the little-used way that led down into the plains and badlands of the West.

Why that way? He couldn’t be sure, for the light was more and more uncertain, but he thought the hide wrappings were new. The dead man’s were, without ragged edges or the blurring of long wear.

Disquieted, the Icefalcon got to his feet and drew the bandit’s dagger from his belt. Alketch work, beautifully tooled and quite old. He called to mind the bandit’s clothing, yellow coat and crimson breeches, slightly too big, looted from an earlier wearer. Boots were expensive and required more work to accommodate to another size.

Then he realized what it was that had tugged at his mind about Linok, what it was about him that he had recognized, or thought he recognized.

It was too dark to see tracks in the meadow now, and in any case there might be very little time. Turning, he made his way toward the Keep at a run.

The Icefalcon was one of the tallest men in the Keep, long-boned and rangy, and he ran fast. He was still a mile from its walls when he saw blue witchlight dance in the meadow by the stream, and voices carried to him, too far to make out words, but recognizable in their timbre and pitch. He turned aside, his heart cold in him with dread.

There was only one reason people would be outside the Keep after nightfall.

Though the Dark Ones had been gone for seven years, the trauma of their coming ran deep. Almost no one who had passed through that horror would willingly remain outside of shelter once twilight gathered. Moreover, with the Sunless Year had come changes in the world. Huge patches of slunch emitted a sicklied radiance all along the valley’s floor, and the mutant creatures that grew from it were not all harmless. Even without such beings, there were always the perils of the mountains themselves: dire wolves, saber-teeth, the bears that were coming out of hibernation, now thin and hungry and angry.

Fog lay in the low ground of the meadows, dense and white. The moon would not rise for some hours. The voices came clearer, and the magefire showed him the faces of the man and woman scanning the damp earth for tracks.

“Sometimes he goes exploring where the old road used to run along the west foothills,” said the voice he recognized as Rudy Solis’.

They’re talking about Tir.

“He says sometimes he remembers things there.”

Gil-Shalos. In seven years they had almost completely dropped the tongue of their own world, even when speaking to one another, save for words that had no translation in the Wathe, like tee-vee and car and Academy Awards.

“You think he might have gone out with Hethya? I saw her talking to him.”

“He might have, if she described something he thought he recognized.”

“Yeah, but why wouldn’t I have …”

Even as Rudy was speaking the words, the Icefalcon was thinking, Why would Rudy need to search? He’s a Wise One. He has his scrying stone. He should be able to call Tir’s image …

Unless Tir is with another Wise One.

He’d guessed before, but the confirmation was like taking an arrow in the chest.

“It’s Bektis.” He stepped out of the trees.

Gil-Shalos was already turning. No fool, she.

“Bektis?” She looked nonplussed as she spoke the name of the Court Mage who had years ago sold his services to the power-mad Archbishop Govannin, had followed her to the Alketch and, so rumor said, had assisted her when she carved an unshakable sphere of influence in those war-torn lands. “What does Bektis have to do with Tir being gone?”

The Icefalcon hadn’t even broken stride, forcing Rudy and Gil to fall into step with him as he led the way fast through the knee-deep ground fog and on toward rising ground, the shouldering bones of the hills that guarded Sarda Pass and the road down into the West.

“We have been had for dupes.” The Icefalcon’s voice was bitter, anger at himself tempered by fear. “Made fools of by a shaman’s illusion. The old man Linok was Bektis the Sorcerer. I thought I recognized his voice and the way he stroked his beard. Were we to waste time going back across the meadows we would find his tracks – long and thin, not the tracks of the little short-legged man we saw. The whole thing was a fakement, a lure, a tale, so that he could get into the Keep.”

Gil swore. Rudy, who was a little slower on the uptake, said, “Well, I’ll be buggered. But he isn’t in the Keep. He and that broad Hethya disappeared about two hours ago …”

Gil concluded for him, guessing, but at the same time sure. “And they took Tir with them.”

Chapter 3

“I was a fool,” said the Icefalcon.

It didn’t take them long to cut Bektis’ tracks. Snow still lay thin where the shadows of the Hammerking mountain fell on the trail, and the prints of the old man’s boots were there, long and narrow, with the heel and nail-work characteristic of Alketch bootmaking. Prints that had to be Hethya’s mingled with the wizard’s, along with the marks of a second donkey, and the three identical bandits with hide wrapped around their feet.

“Where’s Tir?” Rudy held his staff close to the sparkling ground. The magelight playing around the pronged metal crescent at its tip glittered on the crisp edges of the new prints.

“On a donkey.” Gil forestalled the Icefalcon’s reply. Night wind coming down cold off the glacier tore long wisps of her smoke-black hair where it escaped from the leather cap she wore. “We’re lucky the herdkids were just bringing in the horses from pasture when Bektis was getting ready to get out of there, or we’d have lost a couple for sure.” She bore a lantern and a firepouch like the Icefalcon’s, though the lantern was dark; like the Icefalcon, Gil believed in never making assumptions about who she’d be walking with or what she might need.

Some way farther, they saw Tir’s tracks where he’d gotten off the donkey to relieve himself behind a boulder.

“Are they keeping a guard on him?” The Icefalcon scanned the ground by the witchlight’s glow, seeking other tracks near the small boot prints, the little puddle of frozen urine.

“My guess is Bektis has an illusion on him.” In the bluish witchlight Gil’s thin face, scarred across cheek and jaw, was impassive, her gray eyes steely-cold. “He probably thinks Rudy’s with him and that everything’s okay.”

Rudy cursed. He’d been silent most of the way up the glacis, but the Icefalcon knew that the Prince was like a son to the young wizard and that Alde would be frantic with anxiety for her child.

Winds blew down the peaks, pregnant with the scent of coming snow. Not unusual for this time of year, reflected the Icefalcon bitterly, but too useful to a Wise One fleeing over the pass to be accidental.

“I should have known him,” he said grimly, “long before they reached the Keep.”

Gil regarded him in surprise. “How could you?” she asked. “Wend and Ilae – even Rudy – didn’t see through the illusion. I didn’t, and I saw him just two years ago in Khirsrit.”

“Neither Wend nor Ilae ever saw him before the Wizards Corps was organized for the war against the Dark.” He moved off again, leaning a little against the iron hammer of the wind, a bleached, silent-moving animal in the wild dark. “Nor did you, or Rudy, know him much longer. Not to know his voice, or his manner of movement. Not to recognize the way in which he speaks. As court mage to Lady Alde’s brother he was about the palace from the time of my coming there. I knew him well. And in any case,” he added dryly, realizing too late yet another truth, “why would they have camped for the night within five miles of the Keep they claimed to be seeking? I should have recognized a fakement when I saw one.”

“Bektis is a wizard,” retorted Gil. “It’s his job to deceive. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” She tucked her hands under her armpits, cold despite the gloves she wore. She was a thin woman, all bone and leather; cold until you saw her smile. Many of the Guards had affairs with the women of the Keep, the weavers and brewers and leather workers and those who tended the hydroponics gardens. The Icefalcon’s affairs, when he had them, tended to be with women in the Guards or in the military companies of the other Keep Lords. At one time he had considered Gil, though it had been obvious to him from the first that her heart was given elsewhere. His only serious love, many years ago, had been so also, and this time he had not deceived himself.

Now he returned her gaze with some surprise. “I speak only truth,” he said. “Had I gone about my business and left these people to their own devices, the Keep would not now be in danger of losing its link with the memories of its Ancestors.”

The pass had grown steeper, Gil and Rudy falling behind the Icefalcon’s swifter strides, though Rudy was tough, as most wizards were, and Gil a proven warrior. From the top of the boulder-strewn slope the pass ascended, a narrowing corridor of gray-black cliff and blacker trees, losing itself in night. Wind bellowed in the pines and all the world smelled of snow, hard spinning granules of it flying through the white circle of the staff’s light. The ki of Sarda Pass were said to be capricious, malignant, and stern, hating equally mud-diggers and the People of the Real World.

Rudy propped his staff against a juniper in a boulder’s shelter and fumbled through the slits in his overmantle to get to the pockets of his vest. Carefully – his hands awkward because of his gloves – he drew out the slip of amethyst that served him for a scrying stone and tilted it back and forth a little until the light of his staff caught in its central facet.

“Wend?” he said. “Wend, can you hear me?”

Watching shamans and Wise Ones communicate always reminded the Icefalcon vaguely of the games children played. Evidently the priest-wizard replied, speaking in Rudy’s mind, for after a time Rudy said, “Look, we’ve found Tir’s tracks. Linok and Hethya took him. Linok put a spell of some kind on him to get him to go with them. The Icefalcon says Linok is actually Bektis, and, you know, looking back I think he’s right.”

There was a pause, occupied, the Icefalcon presumed, by Brother Wend’s exclamations of astonishment – useless in the circumstances. Spits of snow stung his cheek.

“Tell Minalde what’s going on.” Rudy scrubbed a nervous hand over his face. His profile, a little craggy with the bump of an old break in his nose, cut blue-black against the witchlight, flat white triangles of which reflected in his eyes.

“Tell her he seems to be okay. Whatever they want him for, it isn’t to kill him, or they’d have done it already. They’re taking him over Sarda Pass and calling down a storm to close the pass behind them.”

The Icefalcon could well imagine Minalde’s reaction to that information. She loved both her children with a passionate ferocity: he clearly recalled, during the last desperate stand against the Dark Ones in the palace at Gae, her holding Ingold against a wall, the tip of some dead man’s sword pressed against the wizard’s breast, crying that she’d kill him if he did not save her child’s life.

Bektis did well, he thought, to summon the anger of the snows. It was certain that nothing less would stop her.

“Gil and the Icefalcon are with me,” Rudy went on. “We’re going to try to overtake them and hold them if we can. Tell her to get Janus and a party of Guards out after us ASAP.”

He used a colloquial shortening of the phrase as soon as possible transliterated from their outland tongue – the outland trick of using the initial letters of each word in a phrase to represent the phrase itself was one that was creeping steadily into the Wathe as well.

“Tell her not to worry.” Another foolishness, in the Icefalcon’s opinion. “We’ll bring him back.”

Given that Rudy was a seven-year apprentice in arts that Bektis had studied through his lifetime, the statement was wildly optimistic to say the least, but the Icefalcon did not remark on it. Rudy started to put the crystal away, then changed his mind and gazed into it again, bending his head and hunching his shoulders to shield his eyes from the wind.

“Ingold?” he said softly. “You there, man?”

The merchant who had brought Ingold word of the library cache at Gae had said that it was in a villa on the town’s far side, an area largely under water now. The Icefalcon had accompanied the wizard on last summer’s quest – when Gil’s baby Mithyas had been only a few months old – and had familiarized himself with the city in its new state: sodden, ruined, head-high with cattail and sedges and creeping with ghouls. The old man would have to watch his back.

Ingold was evidently there.

“Look, you got to get back here. A wizard showed up at the Keep – Bektis, the Icefalcon thinks, and I agree with him. He’s snatched Tir.”

At least Ingold seemed to have no extraneous comment to make.

“He’s taking him over Sarda Pass. Me and Gil and the Icefalcon are on their trail, and we’re going to try to hold them until the Guards come up, but it’s gonna be rough. I don’t know what’s going on, but I got to get going now. I’ll be in touch, okay?”

“How did he look?” Gil asked when they were climbing again. Rudy dimmed the glow of his staff to a marshlight flicker, barely enough to permit his non-mageborn companions to see. There was no sense in advertising their location, but no sense in getting lost either, and the night was without light. Flakes of snow filled the air, blurring the donkey and boot tracks.

Women, thought the Icefalcon. They had to ask. Gil-Shalos was a fine warrior and had a logical mind, but she was a woman to her bones when it came to matters concerning the man she loved.

“I would assume,” he said, bending to examine what might have been marks of someone leaving the party – they showed only the later investigation of that medium-sized black bear that laired on the other side of the Squaretop Rocks – “that he looks like a man of seventy who has been sleeping on the ground for three weeks without trimming his beard.” Gil slapped his arm with the backs of her gloved fingers and turned back to Rudy.

“Not bad. Couple of scrapes and cuts, and his left hand was bandaged, but it looked like he could use it okay. What the hell is Bektis doing here anyway, Spook? I thought you said he was working as Bishop Govannin’s gofer down in Alketch.”

“He was. God knows what influence she had over him, but she ordered him around like a servant. Yori-Ezrikos – the Emperor’s daughter – used his power, too; used her friendship with Govannin. But he hated Govannin. I could see it in his eyes.”

“He hated everyone,” remarked the Icefalcon. Blown snow was swiftly obscuring the trail, but there was nowhere to go in the pass but ahead if they wanted to get through before the storm closed it. He wondered how long the Court Mage would keep up the illusion that Rudy was with the little party – if that was in fact the glamour he had cast over Tir’s mind – and that all things were as they should be. Or had Tir realized already that the man he thought was his stepfather and mentor was in fact only a ghost wrought by a mage’s cleverness?

Tir had never seen Bektis – or at least he had been only an infant when the Court Mage had departed in disgrace from the Keep – though he had heard his name. He would understand soon enough that something was wrong, when the man he had seen first short and pug-nosed gradually melted into another form, tall and thin with long white hair, an aristocratic, aquiline nose, and haughty dark eyes.

Why take him over the pass?

“Why take him over the pass?” That was Rudy.

Gil’s reply came raggedly, her words fighting the storm winds. “They have to want him for what he remembers from his ancestors. If it was just to cripple the Keep, they’d have killed him before they reached the pass and split up to get out of the Vale undetected.”

“But he doesn’t remember everything!” protested Rudy. “And we don’t know what he does remember! Bektis should know that.”

The Icefalcon led them into the lee of a small cliff under the Hammerking’s flank, where the wind was less and the snow thinner underfoot, allowing them better speed. Unseen above them the glaciers that armored the Hammerking’s shoulders sent down their slow, glass river of cold.

“More important,” said Gil, “Govannin should know that. Unless she figures to have Bektis put a spell of gnodyrr on Tir, to dig into what he doesn’t remember consciously. That’s the worst kind of black magic, and God knows what it’d do to a kid that young, but that’s never stopped her before.”

Rudy cursed, viciously and with every step as they scrambled up the protected trail.

By the ground’s shape underfoot and the way the wind roared and shifted, the Icefalcon recognized where they were and steered the others hard to the right. To the left streams had cut gorges in the floor of the narrow, U-shaped canyon. The forty or fifty feet that separated this gash from the mountain’s hip were safe enough to navigate in fine weather but perilous when visibility was poor.

This far from the Vale wolves lived, too, and saber-teeth. The Icefalcon listened for their voices above the sea-howl of the trees.

“There they are,” said Gil.

Light flickered and whipped against the rocks ahead and made buzzing diamonds of the snow. As the Icefalcon had suspected, the donkey had slowed them, as had the presence of the Alketch warriors, unhandy in cold weather. Of a certainty none of them knew the pass.

“How many are there?” asked Gil.

“Warriors? Three.” The Icefalcon glanced around him, calling to memory what the terrain ahead would be like. The deepening gorge, the cliff, the stream; the waterfall that would probably be frozen still and the shouldering outcrop of rocks beyond it, narrowing the pass to a gate thirty feet wide. Remembering the wisdom of Gil’s alien upbringing, he added, “They were alike, in stride and weight, even to the way they walked. More alike than any brothers I have ever encountered.”

“Clones?” Gil spoke an outlander word and looked to Rudy for confirmation. His eyes were half shut, as the eyes of Wise Ones were who concentrated on the casting of a spell.

“Come on.” He seemed to wake from reverie and pressed on again, striding ahead of the Icefalcon now, pushing against the pounding winds. “I put a Word on the donkeys, but I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Bektis can use a counterspell …”

“If Bektis figures out why the donkeys stopped.” She was running beside him, a lean dark gazelle leaping up the sheltered goat trail. “He’d have trouble figuring out a Chinese finger puzzle,” a judgment that meant nothing to the Icefalcon but that made Rudy laugh.

“Are we anywhere near that big spur?” he asked in the next breath. The light from his staff dimmed to nothing, but sparks of blue lightning crept along the ground at their feet, barely illuminating the way. “If I can get a rockslide going ahead of them, we can hold them …”

Thunder cracked as blinding light split the darkness. The Icefalcon grabbed Gil by one arm and Rudy by the back of his bearskin mantle, thrust them forward as the snow-roar in the swirling obscurity above told him that Rudy wasn’t the only one who knew how to start avalanches. Rudy yelled “Damn it!” and cried out other words, magical words, answered from far off above the storm.

“Rudy!” It was a child’s voice, piercing and terrified.

The winds checked, failed. Rudy made a pass with his hands, and cold blue light showed the crowding enscarpments of the Mammoth and the Hammerking bizarre in the harsh shadows, the glistening headwalls of the glaciers above. Dune and drift snow clogged the way, and against the thrashing trees, the scoured shelter of the rock-spur and frozen falls, their quarry could be seen.

The donkey was rearing and fighting in terror, the second animal dragging at its rein. Tir was fighting, too, on foot in the clutch of a black-faced Alketch warrior whose grip held him almost up off the ground. Two other warriors, who even at this distance could be seen to be of the same height and build, stood with drawn swords, blinking in the magic refulgence, waiting.

“Bektis!” yelled Gil. “Where’s …?”

A crash of rock splintering. White lightning cleaved the already fading brilliance of the air, and the Icefalcon shoved Rudy in one direction and Gil in the other, springing clear himself as a levin-bolt skewered the ground where Rudy had stood and steam exploded from the snow in a hissing cloud. The renewed glare showed up Bektis, tall now and thin in Linok’s rough furs and quilted trousers, arms uplifted on the rock pinnacle beyond the ice-locked falls. The bandaged head wound – an illusion from the first – was gone. Now his head was flung back, his long white hair and patriarchal beard transformed to flags by the battering wind, and lightning laced his fingers in blue-glowing flame that hurt the eyes.

Rudy shouted a word of stillness, swept away and drowned. The storm winds took the fire he threw and hurled it in all directions, and boulders rained down out of the sudden fall of renewed night, crashing against the walls of the gorge. The Icefalcon, very sensibly, flattened into the overhang of the eastern cliff and stayed there. Levin-fire rip-sawed the blackness, granting brief visions of Rudy and Bektis, and it seemed to the Icefalcon that Bektis wore a device of some kind on his right hand, a thing of crystal and gold that caught and focused the searing light. When Rudy threw answering fire, the jewels seemed to engulf the old man in a protective coruscation of rainbows. The Icefalcon did not watch the battle. Rather, with every explosion of brightness he worked his way a little distance farther toward the donkeys, the warriors, and Tir. They’d all be watching Bektis, too.

It might give him a chance.

The Icefalcon was not a believer in luck. No one was who had been raised in the Real World. He knew Rudy’s chances of defeating the more experienced wizard were negligible, and it was doubtful that he could even hold him in combat long enough for the Icefalcon to get in bowshot of Tir’s captors. Thus he was neither disappointed nor angry when a final incandescence smote the night behind him, a riven cry and the sound of falling rock. He thought he heard Tir scream, “Rudy!” Then the wind’s force smashed the pass with redoubled fury, burying all in night.

The Icefalcon wedged himself into a crevice and waited, conjuring in his mind the slow progress of Bektis down the ice-slick boulders on the other side of the rock-spur, across the winter-locked stream. The temperature, falling all this while, plunged still further. He un-slung his blanket from his back to wrap around him like a cloak, his gloved fingers aching and clumsy. There were broken brush and branches within the crevice, sheltered from the storm and still fairly dry, enough to form a crude torch, though it took him a long while to break kindling into suitably tiny fragments and he had to wait to open the firepouch until the winds eased somewhat for fear of killing the flame within. When he got a torch kindled at last – the Icefalcon was a patient men – he raised it high.