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Alwir and Bektis referred to the Icefalcon as “Lord Eldor’s Tame Barbarian” and made little jests about the things that were, to him, simply logical, like always having weapons and a day’s supply of food on his person, keeping to corners and never being where he could not immediately get out of a room. Their jokes did not offend him. Merely they informed him that they were fools, as most of the people of the straight roads were either mad or fools.
And most of them died with the coming of the Dark Ones.
Wind moved over the land, bitterly cold. Above the overcast that veiled the sky most nights now, the waning moon was a ravel of luminous wool. It had taken the Icefalcon most of a year to separate the reflexive terror about being outdoors after nightfall, developed by those who had passed through the Time of the Dark, from the reasonable wariness he had possessed before. Now he listened, identifying sounds and smells, gauging the scent of greenery and water somewhere beyond the slunch to the northwest that meant he might hunt tomorrow, measuring it against the certainty that there would be predators there as well. A small glowing thing like a detached head on two legs ran by along the top of the ditch – most slunch-born things glowed a little. A night-bird skimmed past, hunting moths.
Tir was out there in the dark, in the camp with Bektis and Hethya and those three identical black warriors.
Eldor’s son.
Eldor was not the kin of the Icefalcon’s ancestors. By the standards of the Talking Stars People, he would be considered an enemy. But he had not been. And he was the only person in Gae – the only person in all that new life the Icefalcon had lived among civilized people for four years – to whom he had spoken about why he had left the Talking Stars People and why he could not go back.
Speaking to him had made him less of an enemy. But what he would be called, the Icefalcon did not know.
The Dark Ones ringed this place.
Tir forced his eyes open, forced himself to look out past the campfire that seemed to him so pitifully inadequate; forced himself to look out into the darkness.
They aren’t really there.
He had never actually seen the Dark Ones. Not that he remembered by himself – his mother had told him they’d all gone away when he was a little baby. Sometimes in nightmares he’d be aware of them, amorphous waiting stirrings in the shadows and a smell that scared him when he smelled things like it sometimes, some of the things the women of the Keep used to clean clothing with.
He saw them now. The memory was overwhelming, like a recollection of something that had happened to him only yesterday: clouds of darkness that blotted the moon, winds that came up suddenly, seeming to blow from every direction at once, carrying on them the wet unnatural cold, the blood and ammonia stink. On this very stream bank – only the gully wasn’t this deep then, and the stream’s waters had lain closer to the surface, gurgling and glittering in the light of torches, a ring of torches – he had watched them pour across the flat prairie grass like floodwaters spreading and had felt his heart freeze with sickened horror and the knowledge that there was no escape.
They aren’t really there.
He faced out into the darkness, and the darkness was still.
The memory retreated a little. He felt weak with shock and relief.
“For the love o’ God, Bektis,” said Hethya, “let the poor tyke eat.”
She stood in the firelight, hair dark except where the reflected glare made brassy splinters in it, red mouth turned down with irritation. Bektis said, “I’m not going to risk the child running away.” He was rubbing and polishing the device that he wore over his right hand with a chamois; the great jointed encrustation of crystals and gold locked around his wrist, gemmed the back of his hand and his arm, and the knuckles of two of his fingers, with slabs and nodules of coruscant light. Polishing meticulously, obsessively, now with the leather and now with one of the several stiff brushes he took from his satchel, as if he feared that a single fleck of grease from dinner – which Hethya had cooked – would lessen its lethal power.
He had killed Rudy with it.
Tir shut his eyes.
He had killed Rudy.
When he shut his eyes he could still see his friend, his mother’s friend, the man who was the only father he’d known.
Hand lifted, the pronged crescent of the staff he bore flashing light, levin-fire showing up the crooked-nosed face, the wide dark eyes. Working magic, fighting Bektis’ spells so that he could rescue him, Tir, get him away from those people who’d somehow made him think that Rudy was with them all the way up the pass, that Rudy was there telling him it was okay to go with them.
He could still see the fake Rudy melting and changing into a black-skinned bald man, a man he’d never seen before, like those two other identical black warriors who’d come out of the woods to follow them toward the pass. Could still feel their hands on him, grabbing him when he tried to jump down from the donkey and run.
Then Rudy had been there, with Gil and the Icefalcon, witchlight showing them up among the rocks and snow and inky shadows of the pass. Rudy running, zigzagging away from the lightning bolts Bektis threw at him, straightening up to hurl fire from the head of his staff, crying out words of power.
The lightning bolt had hit him. And he’d fallen.
Tir clamped his teeth hard to keep from crying.
“Here you go, sweeting.” He heard the rustle of Hethya’s clothes – she’d changed back into trousers and a man’s tunic and coat – and smelled the scent of her, thicker and sweeter than a man’s. He smelled, too, the roasted meat and the potatoes she carried in a gourd bowl and opened his eyes.
“Please untie me,” he whispered. He wriggled his wrists a little in the rawhide bonds, trying to ease the pain. The coarse leather had blistered his skin during the day and the slightest pressure was a needle of fire.
“I’m sorry, me darling.” She picked a fragment of meat from the dish; she’d already cut it up for him. “His High-And-Mightiness seems to think you’ll run off, and then where would we all be?” She blew on the meat to cool it. Steam curled from it, white in the firelight.
“Please.” He tried not to sound scared, but panic scratched behind the shut doors in his mind. The Dark Ones coming. The wizards in the camp setting out flares, setting out what looked like stones, gray lumps woven around with tangled tentacles of iron and light. Fire columning up from them, the wizards’ faces illuminated, tattooed patterns lacing their shaved skulls and grim fear in their eyes. His father’s warriors bracing themselves with their flamethrowers and swords, and the one wizard who’d been engulfed by those rubbery tentacles, falling away from their grip only a heap of red-stained, melted, smoking bones.
It was only a memory. It had happened thousands of years ago. The Dark Ones weren’t coming back.
Hethya made a growl in her throat, glanced back at Bektis, and pushing Tir around by his shoulders, yanked the knots free of the bindings. The rawhide jerking away brought tears to his eyes, and the cold in the open cuts was excruciating.
She turned him around back. “Just till you finish eating, mind,” she said.
Tir whispered, “Thank you.”
“Not so fast, child.”
Bektis rose from his place by the fire, crossed to where Hethya sat tailor-fashion in front of Tir, Tir kneeling with the food bowl between his knees. Tir got to his feet; Hethya too. Tir tried hard to keep his voice steady. “I won’t run away. I just …” He couldn’t finish. Couldn’t tell this tall bearded man how badly it terrified him, not to have the use of his hands, not to be able to run in this place where the Dark had descended on them, this place at the far end of that blind corridor of memories.
Bektis said softly, “See that you don’t.”
The flourish of his arm, wrist, and elbow leading – like Gingume at the Keep who’d been an actor in Penambra before the Dark came – seemed to reach out, to gather in the formless prairie night.
Gold eyes flashed there. Ground mist and shadow coalesced. Something moved.
Tir’s heart stood still.
“You know what I am, don’t you, child?” murmured Bektis. “You know what I can do. I know the names of the wolfen-kind; I can summon the smilodonts from their lairs and the horrible-birds from where they nest in the rocks. At my bidding they will come.”
The camp was surrounded with them. Huge, half-unseen shaggy shapes, snuffing just out of the circle of the firelight. Elsewhere the glint of foot-long fangs. A snarl like ripping canvas. Tir glanced back again, despairingly, at the pitiful handful of flames, the three black warriors crouched beside it, staring around them into the dark with worried silver-gray eyes.
Hethya put her arms over his shoulders, pulled him to her tight. “Quit terrifyin’ the boy, you soulless hellkite.” She ruffled Tir’s hair comfortingly. “Don’t you worry, sweeting.” Bektis glared at her for silence – after hesitation she said, “Just you stay inside the camp and you’ll be well.”
Stomach churning with fright, Tir looked from her face to Bektis’ cold dark eyes, then to the lightless infinity beyond the fire’s reach. Movement still padded and sniffed in the long grass. Waiting for him. He didn’t want to – she’d kidnapped him, dragged him away here, lied to him, she was part of Bektis’ evil troupe – but he found himself clinging desperately to this woman’s arm.
She added, a little more loudly, “He’s such a great wizard, he can keep all those nasties at bay, sweeting. They won’t be coming near to the camp, just you see. Now come.” She drew him toward the fire, opposite where Bektis had resumed his seat. “Have yourself a bite to eat, and roll up and sleep. It’s been a rough day on you, so it has.”
She meant to be kind, so Tir didn’t say anything and tried to eat a little of the meat and potatoes she offered him. But his stomach hurt so much with fear he could barely choke down a mouthful, and he shook his head at the rest. When he lay down in her blankets next to her, with the swarthy guards keeping watch, he could still hear the hrush of huge bodies slipping through the grass, the thick heavy pant of breath. Could smell, mingled with the earth smell and rain smell and new spring grasses, the rank carnivore stink. All these interlaced with the clucking of the stream in the gully and lent a horror to dreams in which Rudy’s death – over and over, struck by lightning, endlessly falling from the jutting rocks into blackness – alternated with the slow flood of still darker blackness spreading to cover the wizards’ flares, to cover them all.
Then he’d wake, panting with terror, to hear only far-off thunder and the endless hissing of the prairie winds.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_dfbf3f0b-497b-5630-b1fc-1f3f2867223d)
On the third day out from Sarda Pass, Bektis and his party were attacked by a scouting band from the Empty Lakes People.
This didn’t surprise the Icefalcon. He had never rated the intelligence of the Empty Lakes People much higher than that of the average prairie dog.
He had overtaken Bektis around noon of the second day, though the wizard was not aware of the fact. Sometimes the Icefalcon trailed them north of the road, sometimes south, taking advantage of the gullies that scored this land and the low clumps of rabbitbrush and juniper that lifted above the waving green lake of grass.
The three black warriors, he saw, carried heavy packs – blankets and provisions for many days – bad news given his own need to hunt as he went. When they halted for nooning, he briefly considered helping himself to their stores but gave up the idea at once. Like most of the warriors of the Real World, he carried talismans to give him at least some protection against the illusions – and the scrying abilities – of Wise Ones, but such amulets were only as good as the shaman who wrought them, and he suspected Bektis would be able to see through such wards without much trouble if he had any suspicion that there was a reason to look. Even could he slip past whatever guardian-wards Bektis might put around the camp, the mere fact of the thefts would alert them that they were being watched, and with a Wise One in the party this was far too dangerous to permit. He was eking out his small supplies of meat and fish with the roots of last autumn’s water plantains and cattails, but even they took time to gather and prepare, and he could feel hunger gaining on him.
Toward sunset of the second day they left the road and turned north to Bison Hill, a mound in the midst of the prairie covered with elder and cottonwood and used by travelers as a campsite – and by bandits as a handy place to find travelers – since time immemorial. Deer grazed in the woods, as did the small swift antelope of the plains.
He worked his way up to the knoll through stream cuts and bison wallows and under cover of the long prairie grass, making a mental note to speak to Janus about changing the clothing of the Guards from their traditional black to the colors of the earth. From a thicket of wild grapes some distance back he watched Hethya and one of the three black warriors – clones, Gil had called them, meaning identical people who were presumably common to her world – unload the donkeys while Bektis built a fire at the edge of the shelter of the trees.
Only an idiot or a Wise One would build a fire in such a place, where anyone could take advantage of the cover to come up on them, even as the Icefalcon was doing. But he supposed that with the advantage of wizardry it was possible to remain comfortably out of the wind and not worry about who or what might be deeper in the woods. Any of the Talking Stars People would have camped some distance from the knoll, where they could see in all directions, even had they had a Wise One in their company.
There was never a guarantee that some other war band wouldn’t include a shaman more Wise than one’s own.
“I can help you,” said Tir, as Hethya lifted him down from the donkey. “I promise I won’t run away.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but with a friendliness in his voice that told the Icefalcon that this woman must have used him kindly over the past day and a half. Indeed, the woman’s face was not cruel, and by the way she patted Tir on the shoulder, and the closeness between them as they stood, it was clear that she was used to children and liked them.
She glanced now over at Bektis, who was ordering the warriors about placing the blankets. It was the closest the Icefalcon had been to them – less than a hundred feet – and he studied the weapon of crystal and gold on the sorcerer’s hand with wary interest. A device of similar workmanship around Bektis’ neck, a high collar fitted up close under the ears, was visible only briefly when the wizard pushed down the furred hood of his coat and tried to untangle his beard.
“I think best not, sweeting,” Hethya said in a voice so low the Icefalcon had to guess at some of the words. “But thank you; ’tis kind of you thinking of it.” She ruffled his hair again. “Sit you down there under the tree a bit. We’ll be having supper soon, and I’ll untie you to eat. Are you tired?”
Tir shook his head, though he looked beaten with weariness. He followed her, his hands still bound behind his back – the Icefalcon could see where his wrists were bandaged under the thongs – while she unshipped a little nest of cook pots. “Does Oale Niu just tell you things?” he asked her as she worked. “Or do you see things, or smell them sometimes, and … and remember? Or think you remember but you don’t know what it is?”
“Like what, honey? Here, you, Akula,” she called out, and all three of the guards turned their heads. “One of you go fetch me water from the spring, would you?”
The men stared at her, scorn in their faces, for in the Alketch men do not take orders from women. Bektis snapped, “Do as she says,” and all started off in search of the boiled-leather pail that had hung, filled neatly with potatoes, on the second donkey’s pack saddle. Watching their aimless movements, it occurred to the Icefalcon that none of them were very bright.
“Like this.” Tir nodded toward the rolling wonderment of green beyond the scrim of birches. They had left the great slunch beds behind them, and for the most part the land was as it had been since the world’s dawn: long grass bright with spring, widely dispersed clumps of rabbitbrush, the dark lines of treetops marking stream cuts sometimes sixty feet below the level of the surrounding plain. “It smells like something … One of those other people was here once.” “Those other people” was how the boy thought about his ancestors, those memories of ancient days.
“Only it was in the winter, I think,” went on Tir softly. “Everything was brown. Did Oale Niu come here?”
“She did that.” Hethya settled back on her hunkers, and her voice changed again, slowed and deepened, as she said, “I was here. Twelve of us rode down from the flanks of Anthir mountain. The mages ringed our camp with a circle of flames to keep the Dark Ones at bay.”
Tir frowned. Even from this distance, the Icefalcon saw in the set of his shoulders, the stance of his compact body, the memory of distant things. “He was here with his daddy,” he said, so softly the Icefalcon almost could not make out the words. “His daddy knew the way. The road was that way, north toward the mountains, by those little hills.”
Two of the warriors came back with water; Bektis gave them very exact instructions about mounting guard on the camp, things that to the Icefalcon seemed obvious. The Icefalcon slipped back among the trees, carefully picking hard and sheltered ground, and crawled snake-wise on his belly through the grass to the bison wallow that he knew from other days lay just south of the road. Bandits – or more likely the Empty Lakes People, whose spirit wands he had seen twice in these lands – would be along in the morning.
And they were.
The Empty Lakes People didn’t attack until nearly noon, but the Icefalcon was aware of them when they came up the coulee to the northwest as a redstart and a raven flew out of the trees. They waited there for a time, for the party in the grove to pack up and move on.
When Bektis and his group didn’t pack up, but rather collected more firewood and water, like people who planned to remain where they were for the day, the Empty Lakes People – being the Empty Lakes People – decided that the thing to do was attack rather than make a closer observation of the grove, in which case they’d have seen that there was a Wise One in the party and thought again about the idea.
Or maybe not. These were the Empty Lakes People, after all.
In any case they attacked, with predictable results. The Icefalcon heard a cry from the wooded hill, and Hethya’s scream. The woman always seemed to be screaming. A man broke cover on the eastern side of the hill and ran across the road with his deer-hide jacket in flames. He fell in the long grass. Another warrior rode full-tilt out of the grove on a dun-colored mare that reared in sudden terror at something it saw but the Icefalcon didn’t.
Illusion. There were amulets against such spookery on the mare’s bridle but clearly Bektis’ powers were greater than the amulets’ maker – and since the Dark Ones’ systematic destruction of mages, many of the talismans had outlived their effectiveness years ago. One of the black warriors pelted from the trees and grappled briefly with the warrior, dragging her down from her horse. She cried out in terror and pain, and struck at something – again illusory – in which moment the black man plunged his sword into the woman’s chest. She fell, coughing blood. A war-dog, probably hers, raced from the trees, coat blazing, crying and yipping in pain.
In the grove other shapes were running around or struggling in the trampled underbrush of wild grape and snakeweed. More barking, war-dogs terrified and confused by enchantment. Fire flashed, or perhaps only the illusion of fire.
Tir, very sensibly, climbed a tree. The Icefalcon saw the boy’s bright blue jacket sleeves among the limbs of the cottonwood under which Bektis had built last night’s fire. He was glad that someone – probably the woman Hethya – had untied Tir’s hands and hoped none of the Empty Lakes People remained in the coulee, which was just within bowshot of the hill. The boy probably knew that running away from Bektis would be a waste of time.
Bide your time, son of Eldor. Watch for your chance.
The coyote who waits can eat the flesh of the saber-tooth who plunges ahead into a fight.
The attack was over before the shadows had shortened the last inch or so to noon.
Leaning up on his elbows, the Icefalcon watched the three black warriors load the bodies of the slain onto the horses that remained in the grove and carry them out to the coulee to dump them. Then they returned to Bektis’ camp, tethered the captured horses, and set about gathering water and making lunch.
Thank you, thought the Icefalcon. Now stay put so I can eat, too.
He crawled through the grass – noting automatically that rains had been scanty here and so the herds would not be plentiful later in the year – to the edge of the coulee, which at that point was some twenty feet deep. Even a few years before, the stream at the bottom had been wider and stronger than it was now. Barely a trickle flowed over gray and white rocks, and the sedge and cattail along its verge were thin and weak, though on the whole the bottomland that lay for thirty or forty feet on either side of the water was lusher than the prairie above. Cottonwood and lodgepole pine made light cover from bank to waterside; lungwort, fleabane, and marigolds gemmed the grass.
The half-dozen bodies lay jumbled below in a clump of chokecherry. Their dogs had been thrown down with them, the heavy-headed, heavy-shouldered fighting brutes of the Empty Lakes People. The Icefalcon took a very cautious look around, then slithered down the bank some hundred feet from the place, which he circled twice before coming close. Carrion birds were already gathered. He wondered if Bektis would notice when they flew upward.
They settled again on the limbs of the cottonwood just above the bodies, below the line of the prairie’s edge.
There had been six in the scouting party. Five lay here, fair-skinned like all the peoples of the Real World, bronzed from the sun, their hair – flaxen or primrose or the gay hue of marigolds – braided and dabbled with darkening blood. Four had perished of stab wounds, and one bore the same lightning burns that had marked Rudy’s face. The sixth would be the man who ran out of the grove with his shirt burning, to fall in the long grass.
The Icefalcon waited, listening, for some little time more, then moved in and made from them a selection of trousers, tunic, jacket, gloves, and cap wrought of wolf- or deer-hide, whose colors blended with the hues of the prairie. He changed clothes quickly and buried his black garments in a muskrat hole in the bank, piling brush to conceal where he’d driven the earth in. His weapons and harness he kept; his boots as well, for none of them had feet of his size, and boots would outlast moccasins on a long hunt.
He collected also all the food they carried, scout rations of pemmican, jerked venison and duck flesh, pine nuts, and bison and raccoon fat sweetened with maple sugar. He hung the buckskin pouches and tubes from his belt and shoulders, working fast, with one eye on the birds overhead.
When they flew up, he retreated, picking again the stoniest line of departure, which would show no mark of his boots.
Rather to his surprise he knew the man who slipped down the bank from above and stole up on the bodies, taking far fewer precautions about it than the Icefalcon considered necessary, but what could one expect from the Empty Lakes People?
It was Loses His Way.
Loses His Way was a warchief and one of the most renowned warriors of the Empty Lakes People. He had given the Icefalcon the scar that decorated the hollow of his left flank in a horse raid during the Summer of the Two White Mammoths. He’d been a minor chief then, and the Icefalcon had encountered him twice more, once in a battle over summer hunting and once at a Moot. If the Icefalcon hadn’t left the Talking Stars People, they’d probably have fought again at another Moot. He was a big man, some ten years older than the Icefalcon, with massive shoulders and tawny mustaches braided down past his chin; the finger bones of a dozen foes were plaited into his hair.
He moved painfully now, and the Icefalcon saw the red blister of burned flesh through the black hole that had been the back of his tunic.
When he saw the bodies had been disturbed, he looked around quickly, short-sword coming to his hand.
Conscious of the possibility of sound carrying, the Icefalcon whistled twice in the voice of the tanager, a bird native to the oakwoods along the Ten Muddy Rivers, where the Empty Lakes People had originally dwelled, though it was never seen in the high plains. Loses His Way turned his head and the Icefalcon stepped from cover, crossed swiftly to the pile of bodies at the foot of the cottonwood tree. “I am an enemy to the people who did this,” he said, as soon as he was close enough that their voices would not be heard. “I am alone.”
Loses His Way raised his head, grief and shock darkening gentian-blue eyes. “Icefalcon.” He spoke the name as it was spoken among the Empty Lakes People, K’shnia. He was like a man stunned by a blow, barely taking in the presence of one who was his enemy and the enemy of his people.
“The air was full of creatures that tore at us,” he said, and turned back to the dead. “When we rode away, the horses threw us and ran back. Our dogs attacked us and savaged one another.” He touched the torn-out throat of a big gray dog, as if stroking the hair of a beloved child. “There was a Wise One, a shaman, among them.”
“The shaman is called Bektis,” said the Icefalcon, framing the words carefully, haltingly, in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People, which he had not had call to speak for years. “An evil man, who has carried away the son of one who was good to me.”
Loses His Way seemed scarcely to hear. His thick scarred stubby fingers passed across noses, lips, brows. “Tethtagyn,” he said, framing the name in the tongue of the Empty Lakes People; Wolfbone it meant. “Shilhren … Giarathis …” Under long, curling red brows his eyes filled with grief.
“Twin Daughter,” he whispered, and touched the face of a warrior whose hair was as red-gold as his. “Twin Daughter.”
Gently lifting the thick ropes of her hair – three braids, as was the fashion of his people – Loses His Way took from around the young woman’s neck a square spirit-pouch, decorated with porcupine quills and patterns in ocher and black. Worn under the clothing and out of sight, spirit-pouches were almost the only article decorated by any of the peoples of the Real World. With his knife he cut off some of Twin Daughter’s hair and put it into the pouch. Then he sliced the palm of her left hand, and with his thumb daubed the congealing blood in the open center of the pouch’s worked design.
This he did for all the others in turn, saying their names as he did so: Wolfbone, Blue Jay, Shouts In Anger, Raspberry Thicket Girl. The Empty Lakes People, the Icefalcon remembered, did not revere their Ancestors, but rather the ki of various rocks and trees in the country of the Ten Muddy Rivers. It was to them that these spirit-pouches must be dedicated and returned.
