Barbara Hambly - Darwath 05 - Icefalcons Quest

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Darwath
Book 5
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Icefalcons Quest
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BARBARA HAMBLY
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?Chapter 1
Had the Icefalcon still been living among the Talking Stars People, the penalty for not recognizing the old
man he encountered in the clearing by the four elm trees would have been the removal of his eyes,
tongue, liver, heart, and brain, in that order.
His head would have been cut off, and, the Talking Stars People being a thrifty folk, his hair taken for
bow strings, his skin for ritual leather, and his bones for tools and arrowheads. If it was a bad winter,
they would have eaten his flesh, too, so it was just as well that his misdeed occurred in the middle of
spring.
The Icefalcon considered all this logical and justified: the laws of his ancestors were not the reason that he
no longer lived among the Talking Stars People.
All the horror that followed could have been avoided had he minded his own business, as was his wont.
Sometimes he felt that he had spent entirely too much time living among civilized people.
It had been a bad year for bandits. The summer following the Summerless Year had seen more than the
usual bloody strife in the rotting kingdoms that once made up the empire of the Alketch in the South, and
bands of paid-off warriors, both black and white, drifted north to prey on the small communities along
the Great Brown River.
It was said they had penetrated far to the east, into the Felwoods, though few came so far north as the
Vale of Renweth. Now it was spring again. When a woman's screams and a man's thin cries for help
sliced the cold, sharp air of the Vale, the Icefalcon guessed immediately what was going on.
In the round clearing in the woods about three miles upslope from the Keep, he found pretty much what
he expected to find.
The scene was common in the river valleys these days: an old man lying with a great bleeding wound in
his head by the remains of a small campfire, a donkey squealing and pulling its tether, and a burly,
coal-black warrior of the Alketch in the process of dragging a buxom red-haired woman into the trees.
In the filmy eggshell brightness of the spring afternoon the old man's blood glared crimson, the warrior's
yellow coat in brilliant contrast to the emerald of the grass, the beryl of the close-crowding trees. The
knife in the woman's hand blinked like a mirror.
Seeing no point in making a target of himself by crossing the meadow openly, the Icefalcon ducked
immediately back into the belt of hazel and chokecherry that ringed the clearing and kept to cover as he
worked his way around.
The woman was putting up a good fight. She was as tall as her attacker and of sturdy build, dressed as a
man for travel in trousers and a padded wool jacket. Still, the man got the knife away from her, twisted
her arm behind her, and seized her thick braids.
The woman cried out in pain-she had not ceased to shriek throughout the encounter-and the Icefalcon
simply stepped from behind an elm tree next to the struggling pair, flipped one of his several poignards
into his hand, and slit the warrior's throat.
The woman saw him a split second before he grabbed the man around the jaw to pull his head back for
the kill.
She screamed in what the Icefalcon considered unreasonable horror-what did she think he was going to
do?-as the man's blood soused over her breast and belly in a raw-smelling drench, and jumped away as
her attacker collapsed between them. The Icefalcon had already turned, sword in hand, to scan the
woods behind.
"Shut up," he instructed. "I can't hear anything." A single bandit was even rarer than a single cockroach.
But there was no second attack. No sound in the woods, at least as far as he could tell over the woman's
hooting gasps.
He glanced back at her after the first quick check and pointed out, "Your companion is hurt."
"Oh!" she cried. "Oh, Linok!" and rushed across the clearing to where the old man lay.
After looting the fallen body of weapons, the Icefalcon followed more slowly, listening, watching all
around him, tallying sounds and half-guessed movements in the shadows of the trees. She'd made noise
enough to have brought the armies clear from the Alketch, let alone from higher up the Vale.
He came up on her as she was dabbing clean the old man's scalp. The cut looked ugly, blood smeared all
over the round, brown, wrinkled face and matted dark in the salt-and-pepper hair. "Hethya?" moaned
the old man, groping for her arm with a shaky hand.
"I'm here, Uncle. I'm all right." Her jacket had been pulled nearly off her shoulders in the struggle, her
tunic torn to the waist. She made nothing of her half-bared breasts, round and upstanding and white as
suet puddings under the terra-cotta spill of her hair.
The Icefalcon put her age at perhaps thirty, a few years older than himself. She had a red full mouth and
the porcelain-fair skin of the Felwoods and an easterner's way with vowels as well.
"We're all right for now," corrected the Icefalcon, still listening to the too silent woods. "Your visitor's
companions will be along at any time. How is it with you, old man? Can you back the donkey?"
"I-I believe so." Old Linok had the well-bred speech of the capital at Gae, before the Dark Ones
destroyed it along with most of the rest of the works of humankind. He sat up, clinging to his niece's
fleshy shoulder for support. "What happened? I don't..."
"Your niece will explain on the way to the Keep." Impossible that the bandit's companions weren't only
minutes away-the Talking Stars People would have already left the old man behind.
The Icefalcon had with some difficulty been taught to follow the dictates of civilized people about those
too infirm to look out for themselves, but he still didn't understand them.
"Get him on the beast and don't be a fool, woman," he added, when she turned to gather up bedrolls and
packs. "'The bandits will have those one way or the other."
"But we carried those clear from..."
"No, no, Hethya, the boy is right." Linok struggled with maddening slowness to get himself upright.
"There will be others. Of course there will be others."
The Icefalcon already had the donkey over to them. He reminded himself that among civilized people it
was not done to grab old men by the backs of their clothing and heave them onto pack-beasts like killed
meat, no matter how much more efficient such a procedure might be for a speedy getaway.
His sword was in his right hand, his attention returning again and again to the place in the trees where the
birds were silent-somewhere between the big elm with the lightning scar and the three smaller elms close
together.
"You're from the fortress, aren't you, young man?"
"Be silent, both of you." He was too preoccupied with trying to track potential attackers by sound to
inquire where else they thought he might have emerged from, if not the monstrous black block of the
Keep, whose obsidian-smooth walls were visible from nearly any point in the lower part of the Vale.
They were there. He felt their presence as one sometimes felt the spirits of holy places, felt their eyes on
the little party with all the training of his upbringing in the Real World, the empty lands beyond the
mountains. He'd killed their companion and was in charge of two and perhaps three sets of weapons and
a donkey, far rarer than gold in this devastated world. He and his companions were outnumbered... So
why didn't they attack?
And why didn't these two idiots he'd rescued shut up?
But they didn't. And the bandits kept to the trees, invisible and unheard. As far as the Icefalcon could tell,
they didn't even follow them as they moved from clearing to clearing down the ice-fed stream, until they
came to the open land that surrounded the Keep of Dare, the last refuge of humankind between the
Great Brown River and the glacier-rimmed horns of the Snowy Mountains, somber towers blotting the
western sky.
"You were fools not to come to the Keep when first you entered the valley." The Icefalcon glanced back
at them, man and woman, for the first time taking his eyes from the surrounding woods. "Where were you
bound? You must have seen it."
"Now listen here, boy-o," began the woman Hethya, apparently indignant at being called a fool, though
the Icefalcon would have been hard put to devise another term that covered the situation.
"No, niece, he's right," Linok sighed. "He's right." He straightened his bowed back-he was a little,
round-faced, stooped man, with blunt-fingered hands clinging to the ass' short-cropped mane-and
looked back at the Icefalcon walking behind them, long, curved killingsword still in hand.
"A White Raider, aren't you, my boy? And clothed as one of the King's Guard of Gae."
Civilized people, the Icefalcon had discovered, loved to state the obvious. In the improbable event that a
man of the Realm of Darwath-and they were a dark-haired people on the whole-had been flax-blond
and grew his hair long enough to braid, it was still unlikely in the extreme that he'd have had dried hand
bones plaited into the ends of it.
The bones were those of a man who had poisoned the Icefalcon, stolen his horse and the amulet that
guarded him from the Dark Ones, and left him to die. The Icefalcon saw no reason for civilized people to
be shocked about this, but mostly they were.
"Had you journeyed as far as we have, young man," Linok went on, shaking a finger at him, "in such
lands as the Felwoods have become in the seven years since the coming of the Dark, you'd beware of
anyone and anything you don't know, too. Cities that once were bywords of law and hospitality are nests
now of ghouls and thieves..."
His gestures widened to dramatic sweeps, like an actor declaiming. The Icefalcon wondered if Linok
sincerely believed that the Icefalcon had somehow missed these events or if he simply liked to hear
himself talk, a failing common among civilized people who didn't have to deal with the possibility of death
by starvation or violence as the result of ill-timed sound.
"The very Keeps themselves are no longer safe. Prandhays Keep, once the stronghold of the landchief
Degedna Marina, was breached and overtaken by outlaws who nearly killed us when we came there
seeking shelter. There is no trust to be found anywhere in this sorry and desolated world."
"Still," said Hethya softly, "it is not so bad as it was." Her voice altered, the broad dialect of the
Felwoods lands transmuting into something else, her carriage changing, as if she grew taller where she
walked at the donkey's head. "Nathion Aysas intios ta, they used to say: The Darkness covered the very
eyes of God."
The Icefalcon tilted his head at the unfamiliar words, of no language that he knew or had ever heard.
There was the echo of dark horror in the woman's eyes, and her whole face, in its frame of cinnamon
curls, grew subtly different.
"You mean in the days when the Dark Ones rose," he said.
Her laugh was soft, bitter, and strange, out of place in the lush-featured face. "Yes," she said. "I mean
when the Dark Ones rose."
Around them in the open meadow a half hundred or so sheep fled bleating, and the dozen cows raised
their heads to regard them with the mild stupid curiosity of bovine kind: all the livestock left to a
community of some five thousand souls.
The pasturage had been shifted again, as the rubbery, alien growth called slunch spread into what had
been the Keep's cornfields, and only a few of the fields themselves remained.
The ice storm that struck in the Summerless Year had accounted not only for most of the stock, but for
all but a few of the fruit trees as well, freezing them to their hearts.
Even the spells of the Keep's mages had been unable to revive more than a handful. Raised by magic
three and a half millennia ago, the black walls of the Keep itself stood isolated in the desolation.
Still, they stood, impervious to horror, night, and Fimbul winter in a world of glacier-crowned rock, and
Hethya looked on them across the meadow with sadness and knowledge in her eyes.
"Not the rising of the Dark Ones that you remember, barbarian child," she added softly. "Not their brief,
final rising, when they wiped out the last of humankind before themselves passing on into another
dimension of the cosmos." Her hand shifted on the donkey's bridle, and she seemed oblivious now to the
dead bandit's blood crusted on her clothing.
"I remember the days when the Dark Ones rose like a black miasma and did not depart. Not in a season,
not in a year, not in a generation. I remember the days when humankind shrank to handfuls, not daring to
leave the black walls of its Keeps for years at a time, fearing the night, fearing the day almost as much.
When the world we knew was rent asunder and all the things that we cherished were swept away so that
not even the words for them remained."
"I remember," she said. "It was three and a half thousand years ago, but I remember what it was like, at
the original rising of the Dark. I was there."
"I don't know how young I was," said Hethya, sipping the tisane of hot barley that Gil-Shalos of the
Guards brought her, "when she first started speaking to me in me mind."
She drew up her legs under the borrowed skirts of homespun wool-worn and mended like everything in
the Keep these days-and looked around her at the notables of the Keep assembled in the smallest of the
royal council chambers.
"Six or seven, I think. I know I startled Mother-and horrified me aunties-by some of what I'd come out
with, things no young girl ought to think or know."
Her wry grin summoned back for a moment that red-haired child, with her pointed chin and wide-set
cheekbones and innocent hazel eyes, in a house whose diamond-paned window casements would have
been left open after dark to catch the evening breeze.
In her smile the Icefalcon, seated with Gil-Shalos and a couple of other warriors near the door, could
glimpse the reflection of parents and siblings who had mostly died uncomprehending, terrified, one night
when the thin acid winds blew cold from the shadows and the shadows themselves flowed out to drown
the light.
Minalde asked, "Does she have a name?" She leaned forward, dark braid swaying over the faded red
wool of her state gown, twined with the pearls of the ancient Royal House.
Hethya's tawny brows tugged together. "Oale Niu," she said at length. "Though I don't know whether this
is her name or her title. She calls herself other things sometimes."
The Icefalcon saw the glance that passed around the room, the murmur of wonderment and question like
wind rustling the aspens by the orchards.
Even the Keep Lords, the few members of the ancient Gae nobility who'd managed to make it to the
Keep with food stores and servants and miniature armies of retainers and guards, were impressed, and
they tended not to be moved by anything that didn't directly impinge on their real or imagined privileges.
Lord Ankres muttered something to Lord Sketh, who nodded, blue eyes bulging. Three of the Keep's
four mages-Rudy, Wend, and Ilae-leaned forward on their bench of smooth-whittled pine poles, draped
in mammoth and bison-hides.
Wise Ones, the Icefalcon's people would have called them, they had summoned spots of glowing
witchlight to augment the flickering amber of the small, round hearth, but the bluewhite light burned low,
giving the big double cell the intimacy of a private chamber.
"Oale Niu," Minalde repeated softly, tasting the shape of that name with a kind of wonder. The Lady of
the Keep and widow of Eldor, the last High King of the Realm of Darwath, had changed a great deal
from the shy seventeen-year-old the Icefalcon had rescued from the Dark Ones seven years ago.
Thin-boned and delicately beautiful, with lupine-blue eyes that had seen too much: a pawn who had
worked her heartbreaking way across the chessboard to become not a queen, but a king.
"And you remember to her?" asked Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep of Dare.
He had his mother Minalde's eyes, large and blue as the hearts of the deepest-hued morning glories, and
her coal-black hair.
Of his father, he had the memories of the House of Dare, memories of the line that stretched unbroken
back to the original Time of the Dark; memories uncertain, patchy, in no particular order, memories of
other people's mothers, other people's griefs.
Some members of his house had been spared these memories, the Icefalcon had been told. Others had
had them only in flashes, or sometimes in the form of hurtful, restless dreams. Minalde had them, too,
inherited from the House of Bes, a collateral of Dare's line. Sometimes Tir's eyes were three thousand
years old and more.
He'd be eight in high summer and looked it now, small face filled with wonder as he gazed up at this
newcomer from another world.
Hethya smiled looking down at him, and her expression softened. "I don't remember to her, me little
lord," she said. "I-I am her, in a way of speaking. Sometimes. She's like in a room in me head" she
tapped her temple-"and sometimes she only sits in that room talking to me, and sometimes she comes
out, and ... and then I have to sit in that room, and listen to the things she says, and watch the things she
does with me hands, and me feet, and me body."
Her brow creased again, and some remembered pain hardened a corner of her mouth. She looked aside
from Tir's too innocent eyes. After a moment she went on, "Sometimes she'll tell me things, or show me
things, things about the Times Before. It's hard to explain the way of it, between her and me."
"Rudy?" Minalde looked across to the young mage who was her lover, seated at a discreet distance with
his two colleagues in wizardry out of respect for the sensibilities-religious or political-of the Keep Lords
and the Bishop Maia. "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Rudy Solis shook his head. He, too, had changed, the Icefalcon thought, over the past seven years. Like
Gil-Shalos he was an outlander, son of an alien world.
When they had arrived in the train of Ingold the Wizard on the morning following the final destruction of
Gae, the Icefalcon had guessed immediately that Gil-Shalos, who now sat beside him in the loose black
clothing of the Guards, would survive. He had seen the warrior in her eyes.
Rudy he had not been so sure of. Even after the young man had found in himself the powers of the Wise
Ones-powers that evidently did not exist or were not accessible to humans in his own world-the
Icefalcon would not have bet the runt of a pot dog's litter on Rudy's survival.
He might do so today, he thought, but not much more. For all that Rudy had been through, under Ingold's
tutelage and on his own, like many civilized people he lacked the cutting blade of hardness in his soul.
"I've never heard of anything of the kind," he said. "Neither has Ingold, as far as I know. At least he's
never mentioned it to me."
He shook his long dark hair from his eyes, an unprepossessing figure in his laborer's clothes and his vest
of brightly painted bison-hide. "When we're done here, I'll contact him and ask."
"It is a most inopportune moment," put in the elderly Lord Ankres dryly, "for Lord Ingold to have
absented himself from the Keep." Gil-Shalos stiffened at this slight to the mage who was her lover, her
life, and the father of her young son, but as a member of the Guards it was not her place to speak out of
turn to one of the Keep Lords. Rudy answered, however.
"When you come to think of it, my Lord, there never is an opportune moment for Ingold to go
scavenging. I mean, hell, nothing ever happens in the winter because the bandits and the White Raiders
are as locked down by the weather as we are, but then Ingold can't get out, either. The only times he can
get to the ruins of the cities is in summer. Are you saying you'd rather he didn't find stuff like sulfur and
vitriol to kill the slunch in the fields? Or books?"
"He could leave the books for another time," responded the stout Lord Sketh. "There are things we need
more."
"Like a new brain for you, meathead?" muttered Gil under her breath.
"Be that as it may," Minalde intervened, with her usual artlessly exact timing, "the fact is that Lord Ingold
is at Gae just now and can be contacted easily by any of the mages here. Wend? Ilae? Have either of
you heard tell of such a thing, that one of the wizards of the Trnes Before should possess the mind and
soul of someone in our times?"
Both the dark-eyed little ex-priest and the slim young woman shook their heads. Their ignorance was
scarcely a surprise, as neither had received formal training in wizardry. The Dark Ones had been
hideously efficient in wiping out the schools in the City of Wizards and everyone else with obvious ability
in the art.
"Well, I've never heard of such, either," said Hethya. "And believe me, your Ladyship, I've looked."
"It is a rare-a very rare-phenomenon." Uncle Linok spoke for the first time, from the corner by the
hearth. He adjusted the shawls and blankets wrapped about him, wool and fur and the combed and spun
underwool of the mammoth, yak, rhinoceros, and uintatheria that the Keep's hunters trapped and
speared in the winter when the great lumbering animals migrated from the North.
"But it is by no means unheard of. As a collector and collator of old manuscripts myself, I've found
mention of it only once, in the Yellow Book of Harilomne."
"Harilomne?" Brother Wend straightened up, dark eyes growing wide. "Harilomne the Heretic? He was a
mage of great power, who sought out and studied all records of the arts of the Times Before, in the days
of Otoras Blackcheeks, my Lady," he explained, turning to Minalde. "It was said he knew more about
those lost arts than any man living, though no one knows how he found it out. No one has ever found his
library..."
"And just as well," said the Bishop Maia. "Just because a thing was wrought by the mages of those times
does not mean that it was wholesome, or worthy of being found. The Times Before were years of great
evil as well as great knowledge. Some of the knowledge Harilomne uncovered was used to great ill, as
anyone will tell you, my Lady."
"But three of his books were supposed to be at Gae," put in Rudy. "That's what that merchant guy last
month told Ingold. That he'd seen them in the cellar of a wrecked villa there. That's why Ingold took off
the way he did."
"And well he should," said Linok. "All knowledge, all magic, is precious in these times." He made a
gesture, then, of stroking his ragged beard, and something in his movement-the way his hand came up,
wrist leading like an actor's-snagged at the Icefalcon's mind. An impression, gone immediately, that he
knew this man. Had seen him somewhere before.
But the round face, the wide-set eyes, and the snub nose were not familiar. Someone who looked like
him? A kinsman?
But he knew as soon as he phrased the question that it wasn't that. Linok went on, "The single reference
in the Yellow Book speaks of a girl in the reign of Amir the Lesser who was 'possessed of a spirit of her
ancestors,' who apparently spoke languages unknown to any in the world. She could identify and explain
an 'apparatus' said to have stood in the vaults beneath the Cathedral of Prandhays since the founding of
the city. What this apparatus was the book did not say, and the apparatus itself is now long gone, but it
was said that the thing produced a great light, and while the light shone none could enter or leave the
Cathedral, nor certain areas of its grounds."
"A force field?" Rudy looked across at Gil-the word he used was unfamiliar, in the tongue of their own
world that neither spoke much anymore. "I'll be buggered. You ever hear Ingold mention that?"
She shook her head.
"And was it an apparatus," asked Minalde, folding small slim hands in her embroidered lap, "that you
came to the Vale of Renweth to seek, Hethya?"
The woman hesitated for a long time, her eyes seeking Linok's. The old man nodded.
"I think we can trust these good people, my child."
One could have heard a snowflake fall in that lamp-lit golden room.
"She-Oale Niu-says there were caves or something in the cliffs an the western side of the valley." Hethya
brought the words out hesitantly, as if dredging them from deep within her mind. "She says she and some
other people, wizards I think, hid up there from the Dark Ones. They walled up things, weapons and ...
and other things I'm not understanding, to hide them there from enemies, after they got the Keep built."
The whole room was an indrawn breath. Hope, wanting, flashed between Rudy's eyes and Minalde's,
palpable as the leap of summer lightning from cloud to cloud.
Lord Ankres said, "But we have all been to those caves, my Lady Queen." He leaned forward, narrow
hands resting on his knees. "Lord Ingold himself has gone carefully over them and found nothing but
marks and scratches on the floor."
Hethya looked puzzled, biting her lip.
Rudy asked her, "Whereabouts are these caves? Down near the old road?"
She shook her head immediately. "No, those were the ones the people stayed in, where there was the
water. These were up higher, and farther on, I think. I'd know the place if I was to see it again."
Rudy looked down at Tir, sitting rapt at Minalde's feet. "Any of this sound familiar to you, Ace?"
The boy shook his head, eyes shining. "What kind of things?" he wanted to know. "Machines?"
For the past two winters he had been enthralled by the mazes of levers and pulleys, belts and steam
turbines, that Ingold was constructing in his laboratories in the heart of the Keep crypts next to the
hydroponics gardens that fed the population.
The few fragments of ancient machines that had been found provided only tantalizing scraps of
information, hints and clues and the tiniest seeds of speculation, which, the Icefalcon knew, drove ingold
and Gil insane.
The Icefalcon himself had little opinion of machines. They could not be made to work and took up a deal
of space, and, upon two or three occasions, trials of their virtues had resulted in nearly killing everyone in
the room.
Gil and Rudy had both attempted to explain to him why it was necessary that such machines as Gil saw in
the record crystals from the Times Before should be made to work again, but the Icefalcon still distrusted
them.
It was said among his people that it took a brave man to befriend a Wise Man, and after eleven years'
friendship with Ingold Inglorion, greatest of the wizards of the West, the Icefalcon had concluded that
one had to be slightly mad as well.
Hethya was still speaking, telling Tir and Rudy and the Lady Alde about machines that would draw water
from deep in the earth or generate heat and operate the pumps that circulated air and water through the
unseen black ducts and pipes of the Keep.
Though Maia was shaking his head in disapproval, she spoke of apparatus that would melt snow and
cause plants to fruit and put forth crops twice and sometimes thrice in a year-the sort of things the more
foolish of the people of the Real World west of the mountains attributed to their Ancestors, as if anyone's
Ancestors would be interested in such matters. The Talking Stars People had more sense.
"I know not whether these things will remain," Hethya said, the Felwoods brogue dissolving again, the
antique inflection returning as the pitch of the voice itself deepened and slowed.
"We hid them deep, for the world in those days was full of foolish men and the acts of a few evil wizards
had brought down the persecution of the Church on them all. A world of time has passed over them, and
time contains many things. We thought, me Uncle Linok and meself. . ."
She was all Felwoods again. "We thought to lay hold of some of these things, to buy ourselves at least a
place to dwell, now the eastern lands are all warfare and bandits and death."
Her nostrils flared a little, and the hazel eyes darkened again, and her fingers clenched the faded gilding of
her chair arm.
"You need not trouble yourselves about the purchase of refuge." Alde rose from her own chair and held
out her hand, her full garnet oversleeve falling straight.
Against Hethya's height and strength she had a fragile look, like the chair she had sat in, the delicate
workmanship of a world fast slipping away.
"Whatever you seek, be sure that you will have our help. Whatever you find, be sure that it will not be
taken from you so long as your use of it be honest. That I pledge you."
Hethya curtsied deep with her borrowed skirts and kissed the Lady's outstretched hand. Linok carefully
unwrapped himself from his many shawls and made his bow, an elaborate Court obeisance that once
again tripped something in the Icefalcon's mind.
But then, it was the sort of silliness that civilized people did, and he had lived among them for four years
before the coming of the Dark Ones. There were many in the Keep-not just the Keep Lords, either-who
scrupulously maintained the old forms, and it was not unreasonable to suppose that such a one might
have a niece with a roving eye and a Felwoods turn to her tongue.
It was the mark of civilized people to make such allowances and not live with one's hand forever on one's
sword-belt. Commander Janus of the Guards, and the Lady Minalde, and others over the years, had told
the Icefalcon repeatedly that every snapped twig did not necessarily presage the swift onset of bloody
disaster.
But the reflection that he was right, and they wrong, was of little consolation to the Icefalcon in the face of
what was to come.
?Chapter 2
"If you mean, do I think she was faking," said Gil-Shalos half an hour later, walking along the broad
Royal Way at the Icefalcon's side with her gloved hands stuck in her sword-sash, "the answer is yes."
At midday the mazes of the Keep were sparsely populated, especially in spring. The rasp of files and
saws, characteristic noises that rose and faded with the turnings of the fortress' tangled hallways, were
stilled as the men and women who labored all winter in their dim-lit cells joined hunting parties or
optimistically cultivated what arable land there was-anything to add to the Keep's slim stores of food and,
especially, clothing.
With the destruction of the entire sheep herd in the Summerless Year, the Icefalcon had immediately
reverted to the wearing of leather and furs, dyed black as the clothing of the Guards of Gae was always
black; others were following suit.
Uneasy torchlight flung shadows over the black stone walls but couldn't pierce the gloom collected under
the high ceiling vaults. Here and there vermillion slits of poor-quality-oil light marked the rough louvers or
curtains that closed off doors of the dwelling cells. Raised largely in the open, the Icefalcon had had a
difficult time getting used to living under a roof in his years at Gae. The Keep was like dwelling forever in
a cave.
A very safe cave, of course. But a cave, nonetheless.
But he had played in caves as a child, up in the Night River Country. He had memorized their most
intricate twists and turnings, their tiniest holes and pass-throughs, in order to ambush his playmates, even
as the children here learned to run the mazes without lights in the course of their games.
He still practiced several times a week, finding his way about the back reaches of the Keep blindfolded.
Following his example, as in many other things, Gil did this as well.
"It is not exactly what I mean," the Icefalcon said, as they turned left and descended the Royal Stair.
Many people had trouble keeping abreast of the Icefalcon's long-legged stride, but Gil was fast. "But tell
me why you think this woman lies about the Ancestor who dwells within her head."
"There's too much of a difference between her uncle's class and hers."
"I thought of that. It is not inconceivable, O my sister, that the man's sister could have married beneath
him."
"Maybe." She didn't sound happy about it. She understood watchfulness as few civilized people did, the
awareness of patterns and when a single trace or scat or spoor looked not as it should.
"But anybody can make up gibberish and say it's an unknown language. Religious fakers in my world
have been using that one for centuries. And logic would tell anybody that people had to live somewhere
while the Keeps were being built. If you think about it, it would have to be in caves."
The Icefalcon nodded. It was, he reflected, part of a storyteller's art, and he'd frequently teased Gil about
the fascination a civilized people had for stories that sounded true but weren't.
They passed under clotheslines draped with garments hung between the Royal Stair's spacious arches to
take advantage of the updraft of warm air and on into the Aisle. Hundreds of yards long and over a
hundred wide, its ceiling vanished high in darkness above them.
The obsidian walls, like those of the densely twisted corridors, glittered dimly with squares of scattered
lamplight; doors, and windows. Multifingered streams trickled dark and clear as winter midnight under
railless stone bridges that cut the black expanses of floor.
At the Aisle's far end, pale daylight leaked through the Doors, the single entrance to the whole of the
Keep's great inner dark: two pairs of massive metal portals separated by the twenty- or thirty-foot
thickness of the outer wall itself.
Dare's Keep. The final stronghold. Unbreachable by the Dark that had shattered the world.
"Both she and that uncle of hers have been eating pretty good," said Gil, and twisted a tendril of her dark
hair around one of the sharpened sticks that held it out of the way.
"And there's a limit to what you can pack on a donkey. But mostly what tips me off is that she thinks-or
she says this Oale Niu bird says-that the Keep is powered by machinery. She thinks that the heart of the
Keep is a machine. And that would be true for Keeps like Prandhays and the Black Rock Keep in
Gettlesand. Keeps where a wizard, a mage, didn't sacrifice himself or herself to enter into the heart of the
Keep as a source of magic to keep it going. If Oale Niu really were a mage from the Times Before, she'd
know about that. She'd know about Brycothis."
She spoke softly the name of the wizard who had sacrificed herself: Ancestor in a way, the Icefalcon
thought, of all those who lived here. When first he had been told the secret of the Keep, known only to a
handful, he wondered why he had not guessed it already.
There was life here in the lamp-sprinkled midnight among the catwalks overhead, life in the flow of the
moonless water along the streams of the floor, life in the breathing of the air. The life of the Keep, like the
spirits that dwelled in rocks and trees, in the ocean and in each of the thousand thousand stars. It was the
only time he had heard of a human being transforming herself into a spirit, the ki of a place, but it did not
surprise him.
The spirit was the mage Brycothis, who had abandoned her body and been absorbed into the magic
walls to draw power from the earth and channel it to the uses of her people within those walls forever.
Sometimes he wondered that everyone in the Keep did not guess. At other times, after he had been
dealing with these civilized people for a while-mud-diggers, the Talking Stars People called them, these
people who had lived so long so fat and easily, with their wheat fields and their furniture and their clothing
that tied up one's sword-hand-it did not surprise him at all. Civilized people would have trouble guessing
what was amiss should a uintatherium take up residence in their parlors.
"But why here?" he asked. "Why make up such a tale?"
"Because we've got food here." Gil shrugged. "And we've got the only setup that guarantees production
of food. Since those bandits took over Prandhays Keep last summer, we're just about the last stronghold
for the length of the Great Brown River, from Penambra to the Ice in the North, and the most productive.
You know how many bandits these days are from the Alketch, soldiers displaced by fighting there since
the old Emperor's daughter gathered troops and threw out the general who thought marrying her against
her will would be a good way to become Emperor himself, the more fool he."
"They are fools," said the Icefalcon dismissively, "the Alketch." The original owner of the finger bones he
wore in his braids had been a prince of the Alketch.
A door in the Aisle's south wall, and a dark vestibule, led them into the watchroom of the Guards. The
triple-sized cell was bright with glowstones-ancient crystal polyhedrons that shed a kind of stored
magelight-and redolent of the warm reek of potatoes, venison stew, and sweaty wool. Sergeant Seya
was playing pitnak with one of the rookies-Gil glanced at the sergeant's tiles and shook her head.
"If our girl Hethya was passing herself off as some kind of ancient wizard to gain status wherever she
lived," she continued, turning back to the Icefalcon, "Alketch bandits' religious scruples might not have
stretched to keeping her around, especially once they found out she couldn't come across with anything
useful. You know what the Church in the South does to wizards. My bet is she and Uncle Linok had to
get out of there fast."
"So they stole a donkey," said the Icefalcon, "and came here ... For what purpose? To hoax us?"
"At a guess. To buy status. Maybe they thought we wouldn't let them in. Everyone loves a good story."
"Civilized people do," retorted the Icefalcon, who wasn't about to admit to a weakness of that kind.
"They could make a good living," he added thoughtfully, "just selling the donkey."
Knowing some of the speculators who operated in the Keep, Linok had probably already been offered
the little animal's weight in gold, which was cheap these days, since it would neither hold an edge nor
stand up to the heat of a cook fire. It was just possible that someone would make an attempt to steal the
creature, though with so few animals in the Keep, such a theft would be difficult to hide.
It occurred to him that he could have killed both the old man and the woman and sold the donkey himself
to the highest bidder, always supposing anyone in the Keep possessed anything he wanted that badly.
None of the Talking Stars People were particularly interested in things they couldn't carry two hundred
miles on foot. The habits of the Icefalcon's upbringing died hard.
Gnift the Swordmaster came in, calling together his afternoon practice, and now that her son Mithrys was
able to walk-and learning to talk, may their Ancestors help them all-Gil had returned to training regularly
摘要：

DarwathBook5?IcefalconsQuest?BARBARAHAMBLY??Chapter1HadtheIcefalconstillbeenlivingamongtheTalkingStarsPeople,thepenaltyfornotrecognizingtheoldmanheencounteredintheclearingbythefourelmtreeswouldhavebeentheremovalofhiseyes,tongue,liver,heart,andbrain,inthatorder.Hisheadwouldhavebeencutoff,and,theTalki...

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