Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

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.”

      Gil said nothing for a time, but her eyes seemed very blue in the firelight. Stars of snow spangled her ragged black hair around her face. She and the Icefalcon regarded one another, each knowing the other’s thought and what had to be done.

      “Will you be well here until dawn comes, o my sister?”

      She nodded.

      “It stinks,” she said, and her breath blew out in a jeweled sigh. “I’m sorry, Ice.”

      “I shall do what I can to leave a trail in case some do make it through. And I shall at least be on hand to help should the boy attempt to flee.”

      “That’s good to know.” She was already sorting out possessions: the lantern, most of Rudy’s arrows, and his bearskin overmantle as well, for the niche was warm now from the fire and there was wood to last well into the next day. She offered him part of her own rations, which at his advice she had started carrying whenever she left the Keep, but he shook his head:

      “We cannot know what will befall, o my sister. Your own life may depend on it.”

      “Myself, I think Tir has too much sense to run for it once they get to the other side of the pass,” she said, adding a fish hook and a couple of her own hideout knives to the Icefalcon’s already formidable collection. “He’s only seven and a half. There anybody I should pray to?”

      “To your Straight God of civilized people.” The Icefalcon adjusted the last of his accoutrements, his mind already on the ice-rimed rocks beyond the waterfall, the angle of wind in the pass. “He is the guardian of Tir’s Ancestors, and of those who shelter in the Keep. The knowledge Tir carries may very well be the saving of them, should some peril arise in the future.”

      “And what about your Ancestors, Ice?”

      He’d spoken of them to her, Black Hummingbird and Holds Lightning, and all those silent others whose blood stained the carved pillars of the crumbling Ancestor House at the foot of the Haunted Mountain. Had spoken of those ki that could be felt there in the close silences, or heard when the wind stirred the hanging fragments of bone and hair and wood. Noon, the warchief who had raised him, and the shaman Watches Water had spoken of their deeds around the fires of the winter steadings, with the eyes of the dogs glowing like lamps, for they listened, too.

      He was fond of Gil but was not sure she would understand how it was with Ancestors.

      “My Ancestors would think it only right that I pay for my stupidity with my life,” he said in time.

      And Rudy’s. And Tir’s. And the lives of everyone in the Keep. That was the way Ancestors were – or the Icefalcon’s Ancestors, anyway.

      “But I have not prayed to my Ancestors in eleven years,” he went on slowly. “Nor would they listen now to supplication on my behalf. I sinned against them and against my people. And so I departed from the lands where I was born. I will be returning to those lands now, but it will be my death should I encounter my own people again.”

      He embraced her briefly and then began his slow ascent of the icebound rocks, long pale braids snaking in the wind, to regain the way that would lead down Sarda Pass to the world he had forsaken forever.