Barbara Hambly - Icefalcon’s Quest

“What?” Alde surged lithely to her feet, crossed the room in a flurry of petticoats, and looked over Ilae’s shoulder as if she too could see in the jewel. “Where?”

“They’ve just passed the wards we set up in the Arrow Gorge. Hundreds, it looks like. Carts and tents.” She looked up into the Lady’s face with baffled eyes. “It’s hard to see in darkness, but I think they’re black-faced, black-skinned, the men of the Alketch, and the brown men of the Delta Islands with gold beads in their hair. They’re coming fast.”

Alde cursed, something she seldom did. “Send for Janus,” she said. “We need to meet them at the Tall Gates and hold them there, if we can. Thank you, Ilae …”

Gil was already out of the room, striding down the Royal Way toward the Aisle and the lamplit watchroom of the Guards.

The Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched Bektis’ camp through the night, turn and turn about with hunting small game in the coulee. They worked mostly in businesslike silence, though Loses His Way asked about the conditions of grass on the eastern side of the mountains, and the movements of mammoth and bison herds, always a fruitful topic among the peoples of the Real World. He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most mud-diggers.

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