Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

4

      Eleven years previously, the Icefalcon had departed from the Talking Stars People, under circumstances which, if they did not absolutely preclude his return, guaranteed a comprehensively unpleasant welcome home. Because it was unreasonable to suppose that any of those who dwelt in the Real World – the Twisted Hills People, or the Earthsnake People, or those other peoples whom the mud-diggers referred to collectively as the White Raiders – would trust one whose Ancestors had been enemies of their Ancestors, there had really been no place for him to go but across the mountain wall in the east.

      As a child he had heard tales of the people of the straight roads, the mud-diggers, the dwellers in the river valleys, though the ranges of the Talking Stars People lay far north of the ragged line of mud-digger mines and settlements that stretched from Black Rock among the Bones of God to Dele on the Western Ocean. Noon and Watches Water had told him the mud-diggers were crazy – which he had found later to be by and large true – and also lazy and stupid about important things, and almost unbelievably unobservant about the world around them.

      In the warm lands where water was easy to come by and plants were coaxed in abundance from the earth, there were kings and walls and warriors to protect those who didn’t bother to learn to protect themselves. People could afford to be lazy and to make an art of telling fanciful stories about things that had never actually happened, at least for as long as the kings were alive and the walls were standing.

      After the coming of the Dark Ones things changed, of course.

      But in the high summer of his seventeenth year, when the Icefalcon made his way east over the pass that now he traveled west, the Dark Ones had been only one tale among many to the mud-diggers and in places not even that.

      In that summer the cover had been better, pale aspens bright among the firs, with brakes of hazel, dogwood, and laurel to conceal him and his horse. He’d moved mostly by twilight since the people of the straight roads kept guards in the pass at that time, fearing quite rightly the depredations of bandit troops from the West. In those days the Raiders had very little use for the mud-diggers’ cattle. There had been gazelle and bison, red deer and wild sheep then in the northern plains.

      The Keep of Dare was the first structure the Icefalcon beheld on the sunrise side of the mountain wall. It had surprised him, he recalled, and smiled a little at the recollection. The houses of the mud-diggers that he had seen before had all been wood structures of two or at most three floors, or in the South low buildings of adobe roofed with pine poles or tiles. He had not expected the Keep. It was some time before he learned that civilized people on this side of the mountains did not all dwell in great dark solitary fortresses, untouchable by enemies.

      Sunrise found him in the thin stands of birch and aspen at the western foot of Sarda Pass. Reaching the place nearly an hour short of first light, he found a spot where chokecherry grew thick around the white boulders that marked the ascending road from the West and, crawling in, rolled himself up in Rudy’s mantle and his own blanket to sleep. The snow lay behind him. Clouds piled the gray-and-white western cliffs of Anthir, and bitter wind nipped at him like a Wise One’s leftover curse. He hoped Gil would be well.

      Squirrel chitter woke him. He had a sling tied around the bottom of his quiver, and it took him nearly two hours to kill four squirrels: spring wary, and spring thin as well, no more than a few mouthfuls each. Still he roasted them and ate everything that wouldn’t keep: guts, hearts, brains. He’d need the meat later. Some of the innards he used as fish bait in the pools of one of the many springs that came down from Anthir’s climbing maze of hogbacks and scarps, and the fish he caught he cooked also. Time-consuming, but he knew himself incapable of rescuing Tir alone if there were a Wise One in the enemy party, and the tracks of Bektis and Hethya weren’t going to fly away. He shaved – his beard had not begun when he’d first crossed the mountains and he’d never liked going furry – and tried to bring down one of the raccoons that came to thieve his fish but failed in the endeavor. The sun was high before he filled his water bottle and Rudy’s from the spring and set out on what he already knew would be a long pursuit.

      He’d taken three horses when he left the Talking Stars People – Little Dancer, whom he had owned for years, Sand Cat, and Dung For Brains. Sand Cat had been shot under him in a brush with Gettlesand bandits, and Dung For Brains he had killed himself when the animal went lame. His dog, Bright Feet, had also been killed by the bandits in Gettlesand: the spirit-bag he still wore under his clothing, next to his skin, contained some of Bright Feet’s hair.

      He found horses corraled near the shining jet walls of the Keep, his first day in Renweth Vale. Stealing two was no difficult matter. These he’d named Brown Girl and Wind.

      Then, knowing he was going to live east of the wall for some time, he set himself to observe the mud-diggers who lived in the Vale. It became obvious to him at once that these were a war party of some sort, though he could not determine who their enemy was and where they lay. They had neither flocks nor herds (except for their horses), nor did they plant fields of the corn, cotton, and beans that grew in the mud-diggers’ settlements in the South. They had a few dooic as slaves-the slumped, hairy semihumans that the Talking Stars People would have killed out of hand – but he did not see children among them, or old people, though that could have been accounted for by famine or plague.

      The men and women of the Keep, back in that far summer, wore either black clothing marked with a small white four-petaled flower or red with one or three black stars. There was a tall man who wore red much of the time and sported a chain of blue gems around his neck and a long black cloak that spread about him like wings when he walked, and he seemed to be in command of the men and women in red. It was a day or so before the Icefalcon realized that another man – equally tall but thin, clothed no differently from all the other wearers of black, save that the emblem on his breast was an eagle worked in gold – was commander over them all.

      This man was the one they called Eldor, or Lord Eldor, and this was the man who, the Icefalcon realized on his second day in the Vale, was stalking him.

      “It only needed that!” stormed Blue Jewels on that second day, when the two horses were reported missing. He made a great expansive angry gesture that would have startled game and drawn enemies for miles around, and Eldor folded his long arms and regarded him in self-contained quiet, his head a little on one side.

      “Bandits in the Vale! I told you how it would be did you reopen Dare’s Keep, Lord Eldor. It dominates all the valley for miles. Instead of expending effort and supplies to make it fit for a larger garrison – which I understand, with the depredations of the bandits growing in the West – you would do better to leave it locked and expand the fortifications at the western foot of the pass.”

      His deep, melodious voice carried easily to where the Icefalcon lay along the limb of the great pine tree that still grew between the Keep and the stream. It was the custom of the Talking Stars People periodically to send warriors south to kidnap men from the settlements, whom they kept as prisoners for a winter to teach the children the tongue of the Wathe. These men they usually initiated into one or another of the families so that when the time of the spring sacrifices came nobody who had actually been born into the families had to be tortured to death, though the hair of such men usually wasn’t long enough to make good bowstrings.

      “As sure as the Ice in the North,” Blue Jewels went on, “if you leave the Keep open, either bandits will take it as a hold or some troublemaker landchief will.”

      “If it was bandits.” The tall Lord Eldor followed the offending sentry back to the horse lines, speaking to Blue Jewels as they walked. “Tomec Tirkenson tells me bandits as a rule are too greedy for their own good. They’ll lift the whole herd, not two out of the middle where they wouldn’t be noticed until the count.”

      After a little more bluster, Blue Jewels – whom the Icefalcon later knew as Alwir of the House of Bes, one of the wealthiest and most powerful lords of the Realm – ordered out a party of his red-clothed warriors to search the Vale, and the Icefalcon made his leisurely way back to his camp near the standing-stones, to move it before they got there.

      He later came to know both Eldor and Alwir well,