Barbara Hambly - Icefalcon’s Quest

“ If Bektis figures out why the donkeys stopped.” She was running beside him, a lean dark gazelle leaping up the sheltered goat trail. “He’d have trouble figuring out a Chinese finger puzzle,” a judgment that meant nothing to the Icefalcon but that made Rudy laugh.

“Are we anywhere near that big spur?” he asked in the next breath. The light from his staff dimmed to nothing, but sparks of blue lightning crept along the ground at their feet, barely illuminating the way. “If I can get a rockslide going ahead of them, we can hold them …”

Thunder cracked as blinding light split the darkness. The Icefalcon grabbed Gil by one arm and Rudy by the back of his bearskin mantle, thrust them forward as the snow-roar in the swirling obscurity above told him that Rudy wasn’t the only one who knew how to start avalanches. Rudy yelled “Damn it!” and cried out other words, magical words, answered from far off above the storm.

“Rudy!” It was a child’s voice, piercing and terrified.

The winds checked, failed. Rudy made a pass with his hands, and cold blue light showed the crowding enscarpments of the Mammoth and the Hammerking bizarre in the harsh shadows, the glistening headwalls of the glaciers above. Dune and drift snow clogged the way, and against the thrashing trees, the scoured shelter of the rock-spur and frozen falls, their quarry could be seen.

The donkey was rearing and fighting in terror, the second animal dragging at its rein. Tir was fighting, too, on foot in the clutch of a black-faced Alketch warrior whose grip held him almost up off the ground. Two other warriors, who even at this distance could be seen to be of the same height and build, stood with drawn swords, blinking in the magic refulgence, waiting.

“Bektis!” yelled Gil. “Where’s …?”

A crash of rock splintering. White lightning cleaved the already fading brilliance of the air, and the Icefalcon shoved Rudy in one direction and Gil in the other, springing clear himself as a levin-bolt skewered the ground where Rudy had stood and steam exploded from the snow in a hissing cloud. The renewed glare showed up Bektis, tall now and thin in Linok’s rough furs and quilted trousers, arms uplifted on the rock pinnacle beyond the ice-locked falls. The bandaged head wound – an illusion from the first – was gone. Now his head was flung back, his long white hair and patriarchal beard transformed to flags by the battering wind, and lightning laced his fingers in blue-glowing flame that hurt the eyes.

Rudy shouted a word of stillness, swept away and drowned. The storm winds took the fire he threw and hurled it in all directions, and boulders rained down out of the sudden fall of renewed night, crashing against the walls of the gorge. The Icefalcon, very sensibly, flattened into the overhang of the eastern cliff and stayed there. Levin-fire rip-sawed the blackness, granting brief visions of Rudy and Bektis, and it seemed to the Icefalcon that Bektis wore a device of some kind on his right hand, a thing of crystal and gold that caught and focused the searing light. When Rudy threw answering fire, the jewels seemed to engulf the old man in a protective coruscation of rainbows. The Icefalcon did not watch the battle. Rather, with every explosion of brightness he worked his way a little distance farther toward the donkeys, the warriors, and Tir. They’d all be watching Bektis, too.

It might give him a chance.

The Icefalcon was not a believer in luck. No one was who had been raised in the Real World. He knew Rudy’s chances of defeating the more experienced wizard were negligible, and it was doubtful that he could even hold him in combat long enough for the Icefalcon to get in bowshot of Tir’s captors. Thus he was neither disappointed nor angry when a final incandescence smote the night behind him, a riven cry and the sound of falling rock. He thought he heard Tir scream, “Rudy!” Then the wind’s force smashed the pass with redoubled fury, burying all in night.

The Icefalcon wedged himself into a crevice and waited, conjuring in his mind the slow progress of Bektis down the ice-slick boulders on the other side of the rock-spur, across the winter-locked stream. The temperature, falling all this while, plunged still further. He un-slung his blanket from his back to wrap around him like a cloak, his gloved fingers aching and clumsy. There were broken brush and branches within the crevice, sheltered from the storm and still fairly dry, enough to form a crude torch, though it took him a long while to break kindling into suitably tiny fragments and he had to wait to open the firepouch until the winds eased somewhat for fear of killing the flame within. When he got a torch kindled at last – the Icefalcon was a patient men – he raised it high.

Gil’s voice called out, “Here!”

By the sound she was at the edge of the drop-off into the gorge.

Black lines of charring scored the rocks and earth, as if the ground had been beaten with red-hot rods. Despite the snow already filling the scars, the air stank of burning and coals winked in the ruins of blasted firs all around. The pattern showed clearly how Bektis had driven Rudy leftward to the cliff’s edge, until he could retreat no more.

Gil had kindled her lantern, and its feeble glow revealed a great final scorch on the rocks above the gorge, the boulders themselves split with the heat. Snow hissed and melted as it touched them. The wind’s main force was easing, but the snow came down harder now. The pass would be choked long before day.

It took Gil and the Icefalcon nearly two hours to work their way down into the defile. Rudy lay on ice-sheeted rock beside the still obsidian ribbon of the stream. He had dragged himself to the shelter of a toothed overhang, where spruces clustering on the rock above further broke the wind and snow. Remnants of a heat spell lingered in the place, melting the snow where it skirled around his body.

“You still with us, punk?” Gil pulled off her gloves to touch the long-jawed face with its bent nose, brushed back the blood-matted hair. Her face was expressionless as bone, but she had gentled, the Icefalcon thought, since the Summerless Year. “Don’t check out on me now.”

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.”