Icefalcons Quest

Chapter 23

There were spells of inconspicuousness a truly Wise One could place upon a man so that he might spend a day and a half in the camp of his enemies without them noticing that the person to whom they were bringing food, wrapping in blankets, sitting beside a fire-with whom they shared accounts of the game to be found on the Ice in the North: ice camels, lemmings, caribou, and once a pure white megatherium-would in any other circumstances be painted all over with messages to their Ancestors and have his bowels pulled out through his nostrils.

The Icefalcon was grateful for this circumstance. He was very, very tired of fighting.

He had no idea who the Empty Lakes People thought he was and didn't care. Nor had he any idea by what spells of illusion Ingold had guaranteed the absence of the Talking Stars People when the little party waded through fog, smoke, and steam up the dripping, hip-deep meltwaters of the collapsing gate-tunnel to the outer world again.

Mostly, once he woke in their emergency camp of snow-houses southeast of the ice-blister, the Empty Lakes People didn't address the Icefalcon by name at all. But the forms of speech they used toward him all indicated that they thought he was one of their kin.

The idea offended him deeply, but not deeply enough to buy his own death by mentioning it. He noticed they addressed Ingold, Tir, and Hethya as their kin as well. Cold Death they did not appear to see at all.

Cold Death was sitting by him when he woke up again, most of her hair on one side singed off from her fight with Bektis but otherwise looking much the same.

"How is it with you, o my brother?" she asked, and offered him a flat-baked cake of honey and fried insects, a specialty among the Empty Lakes People.

He was so exhausted and so hungry he even took it. "As well as can be expected after my own sister runs away and leaves me to die."

"Has it taught you a lesson about shadow-walking?"

"Yes," retorted the Icefalcon. "Never to put you in charge of it again."

And she laughed.

Later that day she helped him stand, and they emerged from the snow-house where he had lain, and walked together along the shore of the steaming lake that now stretched for miles along the feet of the black rock mountains.

The great ice-blister still rose in its center, and steam and smoke poured from a thousand rifts and crevices in its sides. The waters of the lake churned now and then as crevasses or pockets in the underlying ice collapsed, and columns of steam would jet upward, marble-white in the hard arctic sky.

"Ingold tells me that with the magic of the mad Ancestor gone out of it, the Keep itself will collapse."

Cold Death folded her arms, a look of sadness in her button-black eyes. The day was warm, for the Ice, and the warmth rising from the lake made it more so.

Her breath barely showed when she spoke, and she'd put back her hood, the burned patches and blisters on her scalp showing through a thin stubble of new-grown hair.

If she'd escaped serious injury at Bektis' hands at all, thought the Icefalcon, she must be a far, far stronger shaman than he had ever suspected.

"The heat will burst the stones," he said. "Gil-Shalos tells me that the Keeps that were ruined-Prandhays and Black Rock and Hathyobar-were those where no Wise One surrendered life to keep the magic alive. They crumbled, as all things do with time."

"Me mother said Prandhays probably burned at one time." Hethya came over to join them, Yellow-Eyed Dog trotting at her heels. Prinyippos' illusion had begun to come to pieces-Loses His Way had said-the moment Twin Daughter's spirit-pouch was brought into his presence; it was Yellow-Eyed Dog who'd brought down the scout when he'd tried to flee.

The Icefalcon wondered if the illusion might have stood up more strongly had Bektis still had use of all his powers. Breaks Noses and his band, Loses His Way added, had never before had a warrior of the Alketch to torture; they'd prolonged the process as far as possible in a spirit of inquiry.

The Icefalcon wished he had been there to see it, though during Loses His Way's account-technical and detailed as all such accounts were among the folk of the Real World-Hethya quietly got up and left.

She seemed recovered now, though, bundled in the coat of megatherium wool and looking a little rested.

"Me mother says she found signs of burning where the stonework was repaired."

A particularly violent upheaval tossed great cakes and shards of ice to the surface of the milky waters, bubbles heaving and bursting with fog that melted imperceptibly into the miles-wide shawl of vapors covering the land.

"That has to be the Keep itself." Hethya tucked her gloved hands into her armpits for further warmth. "I imagine it'll all freeze hard again once the fires are quenched. And give all the tribes something else to talk of besides caribou tracks and megatherium dung."

"You underestimate my people, Ancestress," replied the Icefalcon gravely. "Should a chunk of rock the size of many houses fall out of the sky and make a hole in the earth, it would not hold for them such interest as a change in the seed content of musk-ox dung. Nor should it," he added. "One must, after all, know what plants grow in one's own range."

She glanced at him under her eyelashes to see if he were jesting, and he turned his face haughtily away.

The Empty Lakes People gave them provisions and sleds for their homeward journey and agreed to accompany them to the edge of the Ice. This was, the Icefalcon guessed, due to the persuasions of Loses Their Way. He saw the two clones many times, walking on either side of Breaks Noses, or sitting, talking quietly, with Beautiful Girl by the fire or at the shore of the steaming lake, Yellow-Eyed Dog lying happily at their feet.

Hethya also spent time with Beautiful Girl and seemed to get along well with her, but it was clear to the Icefalcon that Loses Their Way had no eyes for any but their wife.

"She understands that we must die soon," said Loses Their Way on the second day. "In a way I think I will be glad."

And his brother-clone nodded. They, and the Icefalcon, Hethya, and Cold Death, had gathered near the fogbound shore of the lake. It was already freezing fast, sealing in the Keep of the Shadow with all its secrets and the burned shell of an old man who had given more than he was capable of bearing.

"When we-when I-when those others-died," said Loses Their Way, "we felt it. It was-a dying. A wound that cannot be healed. We are not whole men."

"We are glad," added Loses Their Way, "at least that we helped our kin. That our names will be included in the Long Songs. And that we could see our brother Breaks Noses and our beloved Beautiful Girl, that we can die in our lands by what remains of the Night River Country with the aspens green with summer."

The Icefalcon opened his mouth to point out that the Night River Country was and always had been the range of the Talking Stars People, but he had affection for his enemy, so he did not. Instead he said, "I am glad for you, too, o my enemy. It was a good hunt."

Loses Their Way smiled like a sun god through a gold bristle of stubble. "I will tell you a secret. There is no such thing as a bad hunt, o my friend."

"Your sister tells us that the Talking Stars People have returned at last to this place," said Loses Their Way.

The Icefalcon looked sharply at Cold Death.

"They are camped on the other side of the lake, among the broken ice, near where the tunnel was," she said. "At least the mammoth I summoned for them to chase were real, and not illusion like old Pretty-Beard's."

"If you wish," said Loses Their Way, "I will linger when my people move on and go with you to their camp to tell them what I heard of Antlered Spider concerning the dream-powder given to Noon in the Summer of the White Foxes. With this evidence, even the evidence of an enemy, they must at least give you a hearing and a trial. Do you feel strong enough, my friend, to take on Blue Child in a single match?"

The Icefalcon rubbed his hands, bandaged and bruised within the marten-fur gloves, flexed the ache and the lingering weakness of fatigue in his shoulders and arms. "I have waited a long time," he said quietly,

"to meet Blue Child again."

Beneath the cold brilliance of the arctic stars he thought about Blue Child.

About Noon and Dove in the Sun.

About the Place of the Three Brown Dogs and the Valley of the Night River, the Haunted Mountain and the place called Pretty Water Creek where the Talking Stars People had their horse pens and falconries, where the white dogs of the Talking Stars People lay dozing in the ember-colored grass between the longhouses.

About the sweet taste of milk curds and mead and maple sugar, and the soul-encompassing sting of cold water after a sweat-bath, and the smell of blood and wood smoke under starlit skies.

Across the steam of the lake, thinned now to a scrim of luminous white, his eyes sought for sight of Blue Child's camp-not that even a child of the Talking Stars could see their camp. The marmoreal landscape was still, and in the sky the stars spoke the sweet fragile language that humankind could no longer comprehend.

They remembered him and knew him. There were brothers and sisters who would welcome him back.

He would at last be their chieftain, as Noon had been. From the Ice he would lead them south, to their new hunting lands, for what remained of his days and theirs.

If he survived the fight with Blue Child.

He flexed his hands. The training with the Guards of Gae was rigorous, though not, he thought, so fierce as the life lived by every child of the Talking Stars. He had trained as a Guard in part so that he would not lose that edge of strength. In his heart, he had always known that he would come back.

In spite of the food and the rest, weariness dragged at him, the inner fatigue that is not cured by a few days' rest. Rising from his blankets that morning had been like pushing a very large stone up a steep hill.

But she had been living in hardship and cold as well. Wounded, for all he knew, during the fight at the gate.

It was good odds that they were even.

He flexed the ache from his shoulders and rubbed his burned face, tender around the scraggy mess of beard. It would be strange, he thought, to be home again. Though he would never admit it to anyone, he would miss Gil-Shalos' stories-useless as they were-and the sound of Rudy's harp, and Janus' jokes, and, in spite of himself, going down to the crypts to observe Ingold's newest inventions.

To ride with his brothers and sisters again. To lie in silence among his silent hounds. To track caribou across bad country and to know that he had them.

To be one with his people again, with their narrow dreams hard and focused as diamonds, with the bitter beauty of the dying land. If he survived.

He looked up, aware that he wasn't alone.

"Will you go, o my brother?" Her face was a dark pearl in the midst of an explosion of black fur, gleaming a little with starlight and mammoth grease.

The Icefalcon raised his brows in surprise. "I did not think there was question, o my sister. I am the Icefalcon. I would have been chief among our people. Blue Child robbed me of what would have been mine. Do you question that?"

She shook her head. "I believe that you would have been chieftain of our people," she said. She sat down next to him on the broken projection of black rock that thrust up through the snow-the tallest peak of a mountain ridge buried beneath the all-devouring ice.

"And even after eleven years, I think you could have that again. Maybe more surely because you are a man now, with a man's strength and the core of a man's experience. They will listen to your voice in counsel and follow you in war. But you are wrong when you think Blue Child robbed you out of greediness, to have what you deserved."

"For the sake of Dove in the Sun, then?" She had been much in his mind since the confrontation with Zay in the subcrypts, as if the love he had once borne for her were growing back, mutated by understanding into a different form.

Cold Death sighed. She was a long time silent, her arms folded, a stubby little figure in her heavy coat.

"You are my brother," she said at last, "and I love you. But you are not a leader."

The Icefalcon drew in breath to protest, then let it out. In all his life he had never known Cold Death to be wrong. He sat silent now, looking across into her face.

She scratched her nose and pulled her hood more closely over her shagged hair and the naked patches in her scalp. "There are those who lead," she said, "and those who follow, and those who walk alone. You walk alone, o my brother. Blue Child is a leader. She destroyed you, not out of malice, nor for jealousy's sake, but seeking the good of our people. Your adherents liked you and would have followed you in council and fought for you against her and against their kin and brothers as well. Noon liked you. You have charm, chilly bastard that you are. The Blue Child has none. But she knew she would be a better leader for the people. Do you understand?"

The Icefalcon was silent.

"Were you a leader," Cold Death went on quietly, "you would now be leading the Guards. Were you a leader, you would have gone back for Dove in the Sun when she was wounded."

"She could not have been brought back," argued the Icefalcon. "She was dying. I could not endanger the hunt for her."

"You could have sent the hunt back to safety and made sure that she did not die alone. Blue Child would have, even when there was no hope of saving her, even in the face of possible death herself."

The Icefalcon thought about that, silenced once more.

"The child Tir would have."

For a long time he simply looked down at his hands and the dagger he held in them. At the dim starshadow on the snow. But he saw Eldor Endorion, and Loses His Way, and even Zay of the Keep of the Shadow at the End of Time, who took on the burden that his shoulders were not strong enough to bear. At length he said, "She could have told me that."

"Would you have listened?"

Dove in the Sun laughing as she rode out with his hunting party. Blue Child's face, ugly and craggy, across the longhouse fire, calculation in those wolfish ice-blue eyes.

Noon weeping as he stepped from the darkness into the red light of the fire and held out to the Icefalcon the white shell.

Stays Up All Night, and Fifty Lovers, and Red Fox, all ready to fight Blue Child's friends for him. Ready to divide the tribe, or to split off from it, at a time when the harshness of the winters and the thinning away of the herds as they migrated farther and farther to the south were threat enough.

And for what? he thought. For what?

He walked by himself. He had always walked by himself. He knew this of himself; Cold Death was the same way. He had dealt well with his kin and his friends, but in a way he had always felt separated from them. Unlike Zay in the dark beneath the Keep, this isolation was a thing that he knew and loved.

But it was hard to think that he would not walk by himself in the Night River Country again.

Cold Death was gone in the morning. The day was clear; only the thinnest mist of steam rose from the center of the lake, and already the ice was blue and hard on its verges. Even with the clearing of the steam he could see no sign of the camp of the Talking Stars People, but he knew he had but to circle the lake and they would find him.

The Empty Lakes People were breaking their camp to go. Unsurprisingly, none of them mentioned Cold Death's absence. Such were her spells that the Icefalcon doubted they'd even been aware of her presence.

It mattered little since he knew he'd see her again.

"I think she departed so that she would not see the fight between Blue Child and myself," he said to Hethya, binding up their provisions of frozen caribou meat. "She considers Blue Child a better leader for the Talking Stars People than I."

"Well, that's damn cold, I must say!" Hethya bridled. Even under a coat of grease, thin with fatigue and crisscrossed with bruises and demon-bites, her face had a flirtatious prettiness. She would do well, the Icefalcon thought, at the Keep. "There's a sister for you!"

"I have learned," said the Icefalcon gravely, "never to gainsay my sister."

The others, he had noticed, steered clear of the subject of Blue Child. Ingold had not said one word that indicated that he expected the Icefalcon either to go or stay-Ingold was good at that-but had merely gone about selecting such provisions as the Empty Lakes People could spare and seeing them packed.

Now the old man came over to him, leaning on his staff, Tir walking in his shadow. The boy had had very little to say at first and showed a disinclination, even during the daylight hours, to leave the snow-house.

Hethya, and Loses His Way, and Beautiful Girl had spent a good deal of time there with him, and he looked a little better now, as if he were eating again, though the Icefalcon suspected he still had nightmares and would for many years to come.

At least he remembered, thought the Icefalcon, what it was to have friends and to value them above the solitude of complete safety in a fortress, and that was something.

In the cool gray sunlight the half-healed gash on his face was a great jagged red double line, scabbing and horrible to look at. The children back at the Keep would love it.

With them walked Loses His Way, and it was he who spoke. "My friend," he said, "shall we cross over to the camp? Your kindred should be astir by now." It was an hour or so after dawn-a sly dig, since the people of the Real World would take shame to themselves to be still sleeping after the first whisper of light.

Among the other sleds, Loses His Way called out, with Yellow-Eyed Dog gamboling and biting at snowflakes like an idiot, and Loses His Way turned to grin at him, and waved.

He had, the Icefalcon calculated, only a few days to live. Yet he would lose one or perhaps two of them-perhaps all, if the Talking Stars People took exception to his entry into their camp-to help him, should he ask for help.

So that he could return to the people he had left, to the life of the Real World, that he himself so treasured.

To give him the gift of choice.

"Go with your kindred, o my enemy," the Icefalcon said. "I have nothing to say to Blue Child, nor to any of the People of the Talking Stars."

The hairless brows shot up. "You will not go?"

"The Night River Country is gone." He hadn't thought to say that, which was closest to his heart, especially not to this man, and, looking up, the Icefalcon saw the understanding and the shared grief in his enemy's blue eyes. Loses His Way made as if to extend his hand to him, and, embarrassed, the Icefalcon stepped back and drew himself with dignity to his full height.

"I may be a barbarian," he added coldly, "but I am not insane. We hunt that we may survive, and it is clear to me that survival is a thing more assured in the Keep of Dare than in the Real World now.

Everything that once we knew lies under the Ice. In two years the Ice will spread farther, and stranger things than the Dark Ones and the slunch and cloned warriors will yet walk this beleaguered world. A man would be a fool to dwell in a place so deadly when he could have safety and comfort elsewhere."

The warchief grinned a slow grin into the red-gold stubble that would never grow out into a beard. "Even so," he said, and held out his hand. "I see that living near the Wise Ones you, too, have become wise.

Then good hunting, o my friend, on your new hunt. Do not forget us who are fools."

The Icefalcon turned around and considered Ingold, and Tir, and Hethya, looking at him also in surprise.

"Come," he said coolly. "There is a long road yet back to Sarda Pass. It is time we were gone."

Scrunching stolidly along on his snowshoes, Tir released the hem of Ingold's robe and dug into the hard-packed surface with his staff. The sunlight frightened him at first-the open air frightened him, filling him with panic he did not understand-but over the past two days he had begun to remember how it had been before Vair, before the Dark.

Last night Ingold had looked into his scrying crystal and spoken to Rudy, who had reported all things well at the Keep. The besiegers outside, he had said, had begun to fall sick; Wend had reported half a dozen of them deserting over the lower pass to the River Valleys in the night.

There were mass graves now in what had been the orchard before the Summerless Year. Ingold was making plans about what to do with the rest of the besiegers when he, the Icefalcon, and Hethya returned to the Vale, but Tir was wondering if there would be anyone left for them to deal with.

Except, of course, Hethya's cousin, cooking poison mushrooms in his pots.

Ahead of him he watched the silvery braids plaited with bones, the lanky gray back bent to the harness of the sled-with his left arm only engaged, the right always free for his sword-and beside him the golden-brown, stocky form that was Hethya. Once, to his surprise, he heard the Icefalcon laugh. "Ingold?" "Yes, my child?"

Tir kept his voice politely down so the Icefalcon wouldn't hear. "Is that all he really thinks about the Keep?" he asked worriedly. "Just that it's safer than staying with the Talking Stars People? Does he really care that little about his family? And about us?"

Ingold smiled down at him. "He cares too much about them, and about us," he said gently. "There is a saying that one can't go home again. That isn't entirely true, but the person who goes home is often not the person who set out on the quest and the home he returns to not the place he left. You'll never get our Icefalcon to admit that he's changed since he's been among us; you'll never get him to admit that he suspects that he might not be happy again in the Real World. I'm a little surprised, frankly, that he admits it to himself and has chosen his happiness above his pride."

Tir was silent, thinking about that, trying to emulate the way the Icefalcon moved on his snowshoes, the way the old man moved next to him. It sounded lonely. "Why not admit it?" he asked worriedly. He would be a king, he thought. He would need to know these things. Ingold smiled, his blue eyes bright. "Because it isn't the way of the Talking Stars People to acknowledge that their way is less than perfect," he said. "And because the ways and the world of our childhoods always seem more perfect than our lives as adults. But mostly..." In his eyes Tir could see the affection that he bore the strange cold warrior who had always stood aloof from them all, "because he's the Icefalcon, and, for him, that has always been enough."