Barbara Hambly - 05 Icefalcons Quest

"As you see," he said, "we have not escaped you after all."

Zay's head turned. The eyes that regarded him were white pits of mindless rage.

"I wonder that you will let those others depart, the black generalissimo and the men he makes from mushrooms and filth. He does not regard you, does not even know your name."

The old face, wrinkled beyond humanity, did not alter its expression, but the mouth opened a little, showing the brown broken stumps of teeth, and he hissed again.

Then the chain clanked, and Zay's hand flashed up with reflexes a young warrior would have envied, and fire roared across the dry carpet of the floor like a drench of water hurled from a basin.

The Icefalcon grabbed Tir and dove for the half of the floor uncovered by vines, striking the rock hard and rolling. There was a clashing of chain and then Ingold's voice crying out words of ward and protection and the roll of oily heat.

Looking back, in the flaring crimson light the Icefalcon saw Ingold, standing on the lip of the pit, wreathed in fire and smoke, and before him himself: senile, filthy, reeking, drool dribbling from a toothless mouth, blue eyes blind and wandering, but the face his own.

Flame swirled in columns from the floor again, and Tir screamed in pain: spots and threads of fire burst to life all along Tir's arm, across the Icefalcon's shoulders and thighs, then quenched suddenly with the lifting of Ingold's hand.

The flames shrank to fingerlets in the vines, died to a bed of throbbing coals, though blazes continued to gutter and flicker all around the room's walls, and smoke filled the air.

A woman now stood before Ingold. Gil-Shalos, sluttish and loosemouthed and obscene.

"Zay," Ingold said patiently, though he was panting with exertion and sweat streaked his soot-grimed, blistered face. "It is you that I wish to see." He stood perilously near the edge of the pit, driven back by the flames, holding up his hand to shield his eyes.

He's holding Zay's attention, thought the Icefalcon. Holding him so I can get Tir out of here.

Looked at logically, what good that would do if Ingold were killed he couldn't imagine.

Still he calculated the route, not a good one-past Zay, along the wall where the fires still smoked and sputtered, up the stairs... Wind roared up out of the pit again, slashing at Ingold's beggarly rags, almost rocking him from his feet.

Sleet mixed with it, chips of rock, dead leaves, sparks, and stinging insects. The Icefalcon pressed Tir's face to his chest and bent down his head, blind, frozen, waiting to get the strength, to find the moment, to flee.

Trapped by the vines in the corridor outside Tir's hiding place, he had felt the power of the Keep: the cold, the icy wind, and the water that had poured down over him from the broken pipes had sapped most of his strength.

Zay's strength was endless, the strength of madness, night, cold, rage.

And in the end, flight would do no good. Keep him talking, Gil had said.

The wind increased, blackness at the world's end. The hate of three thousand years in solitary hell.

Cyclone fury that would shred flesh from bone. The Icefalcon closed his fingers hard around the vines of the floor to keep from being blown into the pit and pressed Tir to him until he thought their bones would lock.

Stillness fell. An angry whisper among the vines. The Icefalcon was aware his hands were bleeding.

In the cold black darkness images flooded into the Icefalcon's mind: the Dark Ones surrounding a camp in open country, the Keep of the Shadow looming tall and cold above a valley where three springs glinted diamond-bright in gray rock.

A wolf surprised where it fished in one of those springs. The white hard moon ringed in ice and ringed again with the huge frost-flashes of moon dogs halfway across the sky.

Men and women packing, loading food and clothing into hampers and bins. A girl in her teens pressed back against a corridor wall in the Keep, a basket of laundry in her arms and her hand clamped tight to her mouth as pale-blue lights ran along the wall into darkness. Knockings in the night.

A child crying as her bedclothes caught fire.

They had left because he had begun, slowly, to go mad. The Icefalcon suddenly understood why.

Smoke and mist funneled down on Ingold again, a black whirlwind like a dust devil through whose ragged fringes lightning flared blue and deadly. Wind and lightning drove him to the edge of the pit, wind and lightning and concentrated malice, blinding and tearing and cold.

Now was the time-Zay's mind centered on destroying the rival mage-Noon or any other of the people of the Real World would have told him to flee. But instead the Icefalcon stood up and shouted, "Zay!" at the top of his soft voice.

The howl of fire and darkness, smoke and nightmare, drowned his words.

"Zay," he cried again, pitching his throat to the cutting edge of flint, "Zay, she tried to come! Le-Ciabbeth tried to come to you!"

He hoped to his Ancestors-not that they were ever very helpful-that he had the name right.

The smoke and lightning died. The whirlwind grew still. A leaf skittered, came to rest among the dead snakeskins of the vines. Ingold, driven to his knees on the pit's edge, looked up in considerable surprise but had the good sense to say nothing.

Stillness filled the room, stillness and darkness broken only by the flickerings of the fires in the corners, the malign whisper of lightning deep in the pit.

Anger.

He felt as he felt in the summer hunting on the plains, when the sky turned green and hail slashed sideways over the grass and the long yellow-brown funnels of the cyclones began to finger silently from the clouds.

Anger black and aching and filled with loneliness.

Not one of them remembered. Not one of them remained. She did not come.

The Icefalcon tried to assemble in his mind what Gil-Shalos would have made of the story, how she would have threaded together the half-guessed clues of Tir's dreams, of the apports, of Vair's and Bektis' words and things Hethya had told him or Loses His Way.

"Le-Ciabbeth tried to come to you, Zay," he said slowly, as before him the shape grew into being again, solidifying with a horrible gradualness from shadow and darkness and the choking smolder of the fires in the room.

"When the transporter, the Far-Walker, would not work, she tried to come overland. She died in the badlands, far to the south of here."

The weight of the anger focused, mad but calm. Conscious as he had never been in his life of his naked helplessness, the Icefalcon reflected that the problem about keeping a wizard talking to you was that you called yourself to his attention, and there was very little use in being a perfect warrior if one was going to be so stupid as to do what he was doing now.

The whispering was within his mind, but he knew it came from the sick-gleaming silver speck of a moist eye, peering at him out of shadow.

How did she die, barbarian? How do you know this? Gil would ask, Was she a mage or not a mage? It was important to the telling of the tale.

Also, the Icefalcon reflected, to his continued survival. After this he would stick to the truth. It was easier. He thought about tracks and trails long left cold. "I do not know this, Ancestor of wizards," he said. "My people found her bones in a stream cut on the hill that lies three days' walk west of the great pass of Renweth; her bones, and her jewels, green as spring leaves with hearts black as summer night, jewels such as none of us had ever seen. These we buried with her bones..." Did the Ancestors of the Times Before bury their dead? Why hadn't he ever asked Gil that? He didn't know why, but something made him add, "At the far end of a box canyon, near a stream, where the wild roses first show themselves in spring." And he saw the place again in his heart. Long stillness, slowly deepening-they can find rest in some image, Hethya had said, until they can think clearer and find a way through.