Barbara Hambly - Icefalcon’s Quest

The Icefalcon could well imagine Minalde’s reaction to that information. She loved both her children with a passionate ferocity: he clearly recalled, during the last desperate stand against the Dark Ones in the palace at Gae, her holding Ingold against a wall, the tip of some dead man’s sword pressed against the wizard’s breast, crying that she’d kill him if he did not save her child’s life.

Bektis did well, he thought, to summon the anger of the snows. It was certain that nothing less would stop her.

“Gil and the Icefalcon are with me,” Rudy went on. “We’re going to try to overtake them and hold them if we can. Tell her to get Janus and a party of Guards out after us ASAP.”

He used a colloquial shortening of the phrase as soon as possible transliterated from their outland tongue – the outland trick of using the initial letters of each word in a phrase to represent the phrase itself was one that was creeping steadily into the Wathe as well.

“Tell her not to worry.” Another foolishness, in the Icefalcon’s opinion. “We’ll bring him back.”

Given that Rudy was a seven-year apprentice in arts that Bektis had studied through his lifetime, the statement was wildly optimistic to say the least, but the Icefalcon did not remark on it. Rudy started to put the crystal away, then changed his mind and gazed into it again, bending his head and hunching his shoulders to shield his eyes from the wind.

“Ingold?” he said softly. “You there, man?”

The merchant who had brought Ingold word of the library cache at Gae had said that it was in a villa on the town’s far side, an area largely under water now. The Icefalcon had accompanied the wizard on last summer’s quest – when Gil’s baby Mithyas had been only a few months old – and had familiarized himself with the city in its new state: sodden, ruined, head-high with cattail and sedges and creeping with ghouls. The old man would have to watch his back.

Ingold was evidently there.

“Look, you got to get back here. A wizard showed up at the Keep – Bektis, the Icefalcon thinks, and I agree with him. He’s snatched Tir.”

At least Ingold seemed to have no extraneous comment to make.

“He’s taking him over Sarda Pass. Me and Gil and the Icefalcon are on their trail, and we’re going to try to hold them until the Guards come up, but it’s gonna be rough. I don’t know what’s going on, but I got to get going now. I’ll be in touch, okay?”

“How did he look?” Gil asked when they were climbing again. Rudy dimmed the glow of his staff to a marshlight flicker, barely enough to permit his non-mageborn companions to see. There was no sense in advertising their location, but no sense in getting lost either, and the night was without light. Flakes of snow filled the air, blurring the donkey and boot tracks.

Women, thought the Icefalcon. They had to ask. Gil-Shalos was a fine warrior and had a logical mind, but she was a woman to her bones when it came to matters concerning the man she loved.

“I would assume,” he said, bending to examine what might have been marks of someone leaving the party – they showed only the later investigation of that medium-sized black bear that laired on the other side of the Squaretop Rocks – “that he looks like a man of seventy who has been sleeping on the ground for three weeks without trimming his beard.” Gil slapped his arm with the backs of her gloved fingers and turned back to Rudy.

“Not bad. Couple of scrapes and cuts, and his left hand was bandaged, but it looked like he could use it okay. What the hell is Bektis doing here anyway, Spook? I thought you said he was working as Bishop Govannin’s gofer down in Alketch.”

“He was. God knows what influence she had over him, but she ordered him around like a servant. Yori-Ezrikos – the Emperor’s daughter – used his power, too; used her friendship with Govannin. But he hated Govannin. I could see it in his eyes.”

“He hated everyone,” remarked the Icefalcon. Blown snow was swiftly obscuring the trail, but there was nowhere to go in the pass but ahead if they wanted to get through before the storm closed it. He wondered how long the Court Mage would keep up the illusion that Rudy was with the little party – if that was in fact the glamour he had cast over Tir’s mind – and that all things were as they should be. Or had Tir realized already that the man he thought was his stepfather and mentor was in fact only a ghost wrought by a mage’s cleverness?

Tir had never seen Bektis – or at least he had been only an infant when the Court Mage had departed in disgrace from the Keep – though he had heard his name. He would understand soon enough that something was wrong, when the man he had seen first short and pug-nosed gradually melted into another form, tall and thin with long white hair, an aristocratic, aquiline nose, and haughty dark eyes.

Why take him over the pass?

“Why take him over the pass?” That was Rudy.

Gil’s reply came raggedly, her words fighting the storm winds. “They have to want him for what he remembers from his ancestors. If it was just to cripple the Keep, they’d have killed him before they reached the pass and split up to get out of the Vale undetected.”

“But he doesn’t remember everything!” protested Rudy. “And we don’t know what he does remember! Bektis should know that.”

The Icefalcon led them into the lee of a small cliff under the Hammerking’s flank, where the wind was less and the snow thinner underfoot, allowing them better speed. Unseen above them the glaciers that armored the Hammerking’s shoulders sent down their slow, glass river of cold.

“More important,” said Gil, “ Govannin should know that. Unless she figures to have Bektis put a spell of gnodyrr on Tir, to dig into what he doesn’t remember consciously. That’s the worst kind of black magic, and God knows what it’d do to a kid that young, but that’s never stopped her before.”

Rudy cursed, viciously and with every step as they scrambled up the protected trail.

By the ground’s shape underfoot and the way the wind roared and shifted, the Icefalcon recognized where they were and steered the others hard to the right. To the left streams had cut gorges in the floor of the narrow, U-shaped canyon. The forty or fifty feet that separated this gash from the mountain’s hip were safe enough to navigate in fine weather but perilous when visibility was poor.

This far from the Vale wolves lived, too, and saber-teeth. The Icefalcon listened for their voices above the sea-howl of the trees.

“There they are,” said Gil.

Light flickered and whipped against the rocks ahead and made buzzing diamonds of the snow. As the Icefalcon had suspected, the donkey had slowed them, as had the presence of the Alketch warriors, unhandy in cold weather. Of a certainty none of them knew the pass.

“How many are there?” asked Gil.

“Warriors? Three.” The Icefalcon glanced around him, calling to memory what the terrain ahead would be like. The deepening gorge, the cliff, the stream; the waterfall that would probably be frozen still and the shouldering outcrop of rocks beyond it, narrowing the pass to a gate thirty feet wide. Remembering the wisdom of Gil’s alien upbringing, he added, “They were alike, in stride and weight, even to the way they walked. More alike than any brothers I have ever encountered.”

“Clones?” Gil spoke an outlander word and looked to Rudy for confirmation. His eyes were half shut, as the eyes of Wise Ones were who concentrated on the casting of a spell.

“Come on.” He seemed to wake from reverie and pressed on again, striding ahead of the Icefalcon now, pushing against the pounding winds. “I put a Word on the donkeys, but I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Bektis can use a counterspell …”