Barbara Hambly - 05 Icefalcons Quest

They had been friends for seven years, coming together from that other world where Ingold had found them, unthinkably different from both the Real World and the world of the civilized mud-diggers in their cities and their palaces.

Both had told him of their former home many times, but still he could not picture it, other than thinking it uncomfortable, crowded, noisy, and utterly lacking in sense. Gil-Shalos was a woman whose heart was a sealed fortress, able to survive any loss, but this man was as much family as any she had in this world.

Under her hand, his fingers moved.

The week preceding had been fine and dry. The snowstorm, magically summoned, had not lasted long enough to soak the fallen branches in the crevices and rock chimneys along the walls of the gorge. The Icefalcon made a dozen trips, digging under deadfalls and dragging tinder to the shelter of the overhang, where he piled branches to catch the snow and so form a protective wall, as his people did in wintertime.

While he did this Gil probed and manipulated the broken bones and smashed ribs, ascertaining damage and making sure Rudy could breathe easily. The Icefalcon was personally a little surprised that the young wizard had survived the fall at all.

By the light of Gil's fire he could see the side of Rudy's face was scorched, as it had been in last autumn's explosion in Ingold's laboratory. His gloves were burned away completely, and his clothes blackened and torn.

"I doubt the Guards will be here until day." The Icefalcon sat back and pulled on his gloves again. "The wind's fallen, but it's snowing more heavily now. In a few hours the pass will be utterly blocked."

Gil said nothing for a time, but her eyes seemed very blue in the firelight. Stars of snow spangled her ragged black hair around her face. She and the Icefalcon regarded one another, each knowing the other's thought and what had to be done.

"Will you be well here until dawn comes, o my sister?" She nodded.

"It stinks," she said, and her breath blew out in a jeweled sigh. "I'm sorry, Ice."

"I shall do what I can to leave a trail in case some do make it through. And I shall at least be on hand to help should the boy attempt to flee."

"That's good to know." She was already sorting out possessions: the lantern, most of Rudy's arrows, and his bearskin overmantle as well, for the niche was warm now from the fire and there was wood to last well into the next day. She offered him part of her own rations, which at his advice she had started carrying whenever she left the Keep, but he shook his head:

"We cannot know what will befall, o my sister. Your own life may depend on it."

"Myself, I think Tir has too much sense to run for it once they get to the other side of the pass," she said, adding a fish hook and a couple of her own hideout knives to the Icefalcon's already formidable collection. "He's only seven and a half. There anybody I should pray to?"

"To your Straight God of civilized people." The Icefalcon adjusted the last of his accoutrements, his mind already on the ice-rimed rocks beyond the waterfall, the angle of wind in the pass. "He is the guardian of Tir's Ancestors, and of those who shelter in the Keep. The knowledge Tir carries may very well be the saving of them, should some peril arise in the future."

"And what about your Ancestors, Ice?"

He'd spoken of them to her, Black Hummingbird and Holds Lightning, and all those silent others whose blood stained the carved pillars of the crumbling Ancestor House at the foot of the Haunted Mountain.

Had spoken of those ki that could be felt there in the close silences, or heard when the wind stirred the hanging fragments of bone and hair and wood.

Noon, the warchief who had raised him, and the shaman Watches Water had spoken of their deeds around the fires of the winter steadings, with the eyes of the dogs glowing like lamps, for they listened, too.

He was fond of Gil but was not sure she would understand how it was with Ancestors.

"My Ancestors would think it only right that I pay for my stupidity with my life," he said in time.

And Rudy's. And Tir's. And the lives of everyone in the Keep. That was the way Ancestors were-or the Icefalcon's Ancestors, anyway.

"But I have not prayed to my Ancestors in eleven years," he went on slowly. "Nor would they listen now to supplication on my behalf. I sinned against them and against my people. And so I departed from the lands where I was born. I will be returning to those lands now, but it will be my death should I encounter my own people again."

He embraced her briefly and then began his slow ascent of the icebound rocks, long pale braids snaking in the wind, to regain the way that would lead down Sarda Pass to the world he had forsaken forever.

Eleven years previously, the Icefalcon had departed from the Talking Stars People, under circumstances which, if they did not absolutely preclude his return, guaranteed a comprehensively unpleasant welcome home.

Because it was unreasonable to suppose that any of those who dwelt in the Real World-the Twisted Hills People, or the Earthsnake People, or those other peoples whom the mud-diggers referred to collectively as the White Raiders-would trust one whose Ancestors had been enemies of their Ancestors, there had really been no place for him to go but across the mountain wall in the east.

As a child he had heard tales of the people of the straight roads, the mud-diggers, the dwellers in the river valleys, though the ranges of the Talking Stars People lay far north of the ragged line of mud digger mines and settlements that stretched from Black Rock among the Bones of God to Dele on the Western Ocean.

Noon and Watches Water had told him the mud-diggers were crazy-which he had found later to be by and large true-and also lazy and stupid about important things, and almost unbelievably unobservant about the world around them.

In the warm lands where water was easy to come by and plants were coaxed in abundance from the earth, there were kings and walls and warriors to protect those who didn't bother to learn to protect themselves. People could afford to be lazy and to make an art of telling fanciful stories about things that had never actually happened, at least for as long as the kings were alive and the walls were standing.

After the coming of the Dark Ones things changed, of course. But in the high summer of his seventeenth year, when the Icefalcon made his way east over the pass that now he traveled west, the Dark Ones had been only one tale among many to the mud-diggers and in places not even that.

In that summer the cover had been better, pale aspens bright among the firs, with brakes of hazel, dogwood, and laurel to conceal him and his horse. He'd moved mostly by twilight since the people of the straight roads kept guards in the pass at that time, fearing quite rightly the depredations of bandit troops from the West. In those days the Raiders had very little use for the mud-diggers' cattle. There had been gazelle and bison, red deer and wild sheep then in the northern plains.

The Keep of Dare was the first structure the Icefalcon beheld on the sunrise side of the mountain wall. It had surprised him, he recalled, and smiled a little at the recollection. The houses of the mud diggers that he had seen before had all been wood structures of two or at most three floors, or in the South, low buildings of adobe roofed with pine poles or tiles. He had not expected the Keep. It was some time before he learned that civilized people on this side of the mountains did not all dwell in great dark solitary fortresses, untouchable by enemies.

Sunrise found him in the thin stands of birch and aspen at the western foot of Sarda Pass. Reaching the place nearly an hour short of first light, he found a spot where chokecherry grew thick around the white boulders that marked the ascending road from the West and, crawling in, rolled himself up in Rudy's mantle and his own blanket to sleep. The snow lay behind him. Clouds piled the gray-and-white western cliffs of Anthir, and bitter wind nipped at him like a Wise One's leftover curse. He hoped Gil would be well.