Barbara Hambly - 05 Icefalcons Quest

The Icefalcon pitched gasping through the vestibule door and whipped sword from sheath-"They're behind me!"-and turned even as he cried the words to slice the first man through the door behind him.

More yelling, more milling in the vestibule-weapons thrusting through the narrow opening; seize, slash, block. Blood gouting out in streams and a severed hand flying against the wall like a swatted bug.

"Mother of Tears!" cried Hethya, and Loses His Way demanded, "Where's the boy?"

"With Ingold" was all the Icefalcon had time to rasp as a halberd opened his leather sleeve.

"He's safe?"

"God, no," panted the Icefalcon. "Don't be a fool."

"Oh," she said, evidently realizing the absurdity of the word in the circumstances. "Sorry. If you've got any brilliant strategies at this point, boy-o," she added a moment later, "how about trottin' 'em out?"

Smoke poured from the vestibule, thicker and rank with the smell of new burning. The air was like an oven, the floor underfoot hot through his boot-soles.

"A curtain wall would help," panted the Icefalcon. "Machiolations. Boiling oil." It was impossible to breathe.

"We'd have that if we hadn't eaten all the pemmican."

The Icefalcon sliced hard at the next head to appear through the doorway, had his blade intercepted on a two-pronged halberd. The inexperience of the clone that wielded it was the only thing that saved the Icefalcon from having the weapon wrenched out of his hand; he was able to slip in under the shaft and slash the man's arm with his dagger, then pull free. Instinct made him keep low-Hethya's swordswipe at the next enemy would have taken his ear off.

"Waste of good food," he said.

The ventilation shafts gushed nothing but smoke now; the Icefalcon felt his skin blister in the scorching air.

"Can we ourselves use the Far-Walker?" asked Loses His Way. Blood streamed from his chest and arm where a lance had pierced. "Get out of this place and warn the people of the Keep?"

"We can't activate it." The Icefalcon hacked again with his sword, his arms like lead. "It takes a Wise One to do that." Blood spouted over him from the man whose throat he opened; someone in the rear rank pulled the dying clone aside.

"And that's what Ingold's gone to do?"

"Don't be a fool, woman," snapped the Icefalcon. "The last thing we need is to open the way into the Keep with Vair right outside."

"Well, I've no intention of roasting to death to save your lot!"

"You think Vair will spare you?"

There was an outcry from deeper within the vestibule, beyond the heads of the crowding clones. The clones themselves-hundreds of them-were barefoot, scantily clothed, their skin patchy and odd looking, greenish even in the livid light, or the slick, vile orange of the monster toadstools.

Now and then during the confused struggle in the doorway the Icefalcon had the impression that one or more would suddenly go berserk in the vestibule, turning on his companions, slaying and being slain or rushing out into the bellowing furnace of the corridor.

Then a voice cried beyond the press, "Put down your weapons!" The clones in the doorway ceased to fight, fell back untidily to show the defenders Vair na-Chandros, his white tabard soot-blackened, a tulwar in his hand. Bektis stood beside him, smutted, filthy, gasping, holding Tir against him with one hand, a silver knife at his throat.

Vair's teeth glinted under pulled-back lips. "Get back," he said. "Let us pass or the boy dies."

"I thought you said," began Hethya furiously, and the Icefalcon said, "Shut up!"

His eyes met Tir's. The boy's were stretched with panic under a mask of smoke and blood. Anything could go wrong in any hunt, thought the Icefalcon. All it would take, in that maelstrom of smoke and heat and darkness, would be for Ingold to lose his grip on Tir's hand; for the old man to have been overcome by fumes, or fire summoned by Bektis, or some trap in the Keep itself.

Bektis was weakened and in no good case to fight, but then Ingold wasn't, either. The Court Mage would have found it easy to lure the child to him in the confusion.

The Icefalcon stepped back. Tir screamed, "Don't let them! Let me die, I order you! Please! Don't let..."

Bektis shook him, hard. "Be still, boy."

The Icefalcon retreated, sword pointing out, Hethya and Loses His Way closing in on both sides. Vair stepped through the vestibule door, clones surrounding him, their stupid gazes wandering. Some were beginning to rot already, stinking appallingly above the calcifying heat.

"Good." Vair's eye traveled calculatingly around the big chamber, seeking other defenders, finding none.

"Very good. Prandhays Keep has been broken, time and again through the years; its walls would never stand against the Devices that harridan wife of mine, Yori-Ezrikos, now commands. But Renweth..."

He smiled under his dark mustache, though he was panting for breath in the heat. "Renweth is another story. Whatever weapons we find there, Bektis, in Renweth we will have a base to raise and provision the force I will need to march south and retake what is rightfully mine. And who knows what Devices are hidden there."

His lips parted in an ugly grin as he thought of the twelve-year old girl he had raped on their wedding night, the girl who had hated him so much that she'd murdered the son she bore him. And the relish in that grin, the vile amusement, made the Icefalcon realize that by comparison Blue Child's ferocity was as innocent as summer rain.

"I look forward, Bektis, to seeing Yori-Ezrikos again. Is the way open, Bektis?"

The mage edged at his heels, long white fingers closed around Tir's jaw in a strangling grip. "The way is open, my Lord. Behold."

He lifted the hand that held the silver knife and made a pass in the air, speaking words that sounded nothing like Hethya's made-up tongue of the Times Before. Behind him the columns of crystal, ranked room to room in a line, flickered with cores of greenish light, and threads of starshine seemed to race along the floor between them.

A hot, quick flicker of light flashed, far back in the dark, and the smoke that bellied thick beneath the high ceiling stirred, then streamed inward, pouring between the pillars through the second chamber and the third.

As he had in his shadow vision, the Icefalcon half discerned more pillars than there should have been, a fourth and a fifth and a sixth pair, and on past into darkness.

Vair gestured to the clones. "Go," he said. "Kill all that you meet."

"I trust," said Bektis smugly, "that your Lordship is well satisfied?" His attention was on Vair, in anticipation of an accolade that, the Icefalcon reflected, he should have had more sense than to expect, and in that moment of distraction, Tir acted.

With the neat speed of a man's, the boy's hand dropped to his boot-top and the next second there was a dagger in it, a dagger with which he slashed across the back of Bektis' hand. Bektis screamed, jerked back, and the boy was free, running.

The Icefalcon was moving, too. In a single long leap he reached the child's side, seconds before Vair's left-handed fumble for his sword. The Icefalcon's sword tangled with the dark commander's blade, flung the weapon aside, and struck back the blade of the nearest clone's attack as his momentum carried him, and Tir, out of immediate danger.

Vair screamed, "Stop him! Kill him!" as the Icefalcon slapped into the wall between Hethya and Loses His Way, sword pointing outward once more.

Bektis, clutching his bleeding hand to his breast, snarled, "The room's under a Rune of Silence, fool!"

Behind the Icefalcon, Tir was sobbing, "Stop them! Please, stop them!" and struggling to push through, as if he would attack the clones himself, but none of the three warriors made a move.

"There's nothing we can do," said the Icefalcon softly. He had already caught, above the stench of smoke and rot and burning, a smell from the inner chambers of the transporter, a smell green and anomalous, that told him that all was not as Vair supposed it to be.