Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

kind,” he said. “Neither has Ingold, as far as I know. At least he’s never mentioned it to me.” He shook his long dark hair from his eyes, an unprepossessing figure in his laborer’s clothes and his vest of brightly painted bison-hide. “When we’re done here, I’ll contact him and ask.”

      “It is a most inopportune moment,” put in the elderly Lord Ankres dryly, “for Lord Ingold to have absented himself from the Keep.”

      Gil-Shalos stiffened at this slight to the mage who was her lover, her life, and the father of her young son, but as a member of the Guards it was not her place to speak out of turn to one of the Keep Lords. Rudy answered, however.

      “When you come to think of it, my Lord, there never is an opportune moment for Ingold to go scavenging. I mean, hell, nothing ever happens in the winter because the bandits and the White Raiders are as locked down by the weather as we are, but then Ingold can’t get out, either. The only times he can get to the ruins of the cities is in summer. Are you saying you’d rather he didn’t find stuff like sulfur and vitriol to kill the slunch in the fields? Or books?”

      “He could leave the books for another time,” responded the stout Lord Sketh. “There are things we need more.”

      “Like a new brain for you, meathead?” muttered Gil under her breath.

      “Be that as it may,” Minalde intervened, with her usual artlessly exact timing, “the fact is that Lord Ingold is at Gae just now and can be contacted easily by any of the mages here. Wend? Ilae? Have either of you heard tell of such a thing, that one of the wizards of the Times Before should possess the mind and soul of someone in our times?”

      Both the dark-eyed little ex-priest and the slim young woman shook their heads. Their ignorance was scarcely a surprise, as neither had received formal training in wizardry. The Dark Ones had been hideously efficient in wiping out the schools in the City of Wizards and everyone else with obvious ability in the art.

      “Well, I’ve never heard of such, either,” said Hethya. “And believe me, your Ladyship, I’ve looked.”

      “It is a rare – a very rare – phenomenon.” Uncle Linok spoke for the first time, from the corner by the hearth. He adjusted the shawls and blankets wrapped about him, wool and fur and the combed and spun underwool of the mammoth, yak, rhinoceros, and uintatheria that the Keep’s hunters trapped and speared in the winter when the great lumbering animals migrated from the North.

      “But it is by no means unheard of. As a collector and collator of old manuscripts myself, I’ve found mention of it only once, in the Yellow Book of Harilómne.”

      “Harilómne?” Brother Wend straightened up, dark eyes growing wide. “Harilómne the Heretic? He was a mage of great power, who sought out and studied all records of the arts of the Times Before, in the days of Otoras Blackcheeks, my Lady,” he explained, turning to Minalde. “It was said he knew more about those lost arts than any man living, though no one knows how he found it out. No one has ever found his library …”

      “And just as well,” said the Bishop Maia. “Just because a thing was wrought by the mages of those times does not mean that it was wholesome, or worthy of being found. The Times Before were years of great evil as well as great knowledge. Some of the knowledge Harilómne uncovered was used to great ill, as anyone will tell you, my Lady.”

      “But three of his books were supposed to be at Gae,” put in Rudy. “That’s what that merchant guy last month told Ingold. That he’d seen them in the cellar of a wrecked villa there. That’s why Ingold took off the way he did.”

      “And well he should,” said Linok. “All knowledge, all magic, is precious in these times.” He made a gesture, then, of stroking his ragged beard, and something in his movement – the way his hand came up, wrist leading like an actor’s – snagged at the Icefalcon’s mind. An impression, gone immediately, that he knew this man. Had seen him somewhere before.

      But the round face, the wide-set eyes, and the snub nose were not familiar.

      Someone who looked like him? A kinsman?

      But he knew as soon as he phrased the question that it wasn’t that.

      Linok went on, “The single reference in the Yellow Book speaks of a girl in the reign of Amir the Lesser who was ‘possessed of a spirit of her ancestors,’ who apparently spoke languages unknown to any in the world. She could identify and explain an ‘apparatus’ ‘said to have stood in the vaults beneath the Cathedral of Prandhays since the founding of the city.’ What this apparatus was the book did not say, and the apparatus itself is now long gone, but it was said that the thing produced a great light, and while the light shone none could enter or leave the Cathedral, nor certain areas of its grounds.”

      “A force field?” Rudy looked across at Gil – the word he used was unfamiliar, in the tongue of their own world that neither spoke much anymore. “I’ll be buggered. You ever hear Ingold mention that?”

      She shook her head.

      “And was it an apparatus,” asked Minalde, folding small slim hands in her embroidered lap, “that you came to the Vale of Renweth to seek, Hethya?”

      The woman hesitated for a long time, her eyes seeking Linok’s. The old man nodded.

      “I think we can trust these good people, my child.”

      One could have heard a snowflake fall in that lamp-lit golden room.

      “She – Oale Niu – says there were caves or something in the cliffs on the western side of the valley.” Hethya brought the words out hesitantly, as if dredging them from deep within her mind. “She says she and some other people, wizards I think, hid up there from the Dark Ones. They walled up things, weapons and … and other things I’m not understanding, to hide them there from enemies, after they got the Keep built.”

      The whole room was an indrawn breath. Hope, wanting, flashed between Rudy’s eyes and Minalde’s, palpable as the leap of summer lightning from cloud to cloud.

      Lord Ankres said, “But we have all been to those caves, my Lady Queen.” He leaned forward, narrow hands resting on his knees. “Lord Ingold himself has gone carefully over them and found nothing but marks and scratches on the floor.”

      Hethya looked puzzled, biting her lip.

      Rudy asked her, “Whereabouts are these caves? Down near the old road?”

      She shook her head immediately. “No, those were the ones the people stayed in, where there was the water. These were up higher, and farther on, I think. I’d know the place if I was to see it again.”

      Rudy looked down at Tir, sitting rapt at Minalde’s feet. “Any of this sound familiar to you, Ace?”

      The boy shook his head, eyes shining. “What kind of things?” he wanted to know. “Machines?” For the past two winters he had been enthralled by the mazes of levers and pulleys, belts and steam turbines, that Ingold was constructing in his laboratories in the heart of the Keep crypts next to the hydroponics gardens that fed the population. The few fragments of ancient machines that had been found provided only tantalizing scraps of information, hints and clues and the tiniest seeds of speculation, which, the Icefalcon knew, drove Ingold and Gil insane.

      The Icefalcon himself had little opinion of machines. They could not be made to work and took up a deal of space, and, upon two or three occasions, trials of their virtues had resulted in nearly killing everyone in the room. Gil and Rudy had both attempted to explain to him why it was necessary that such machines as Gil saw in the record crystals from the Times Before should be made to work again, but the Icefalcon still distrusted them.

      It was said among his people that it took a brave man to befriend a Wise Man, and after eleven years’ friendship with Ingold Inglorion, greatest of the wizards of the West, the Icefalcon had concluded that one had to be slightly mad as well.

      Hethya was still speaking, telling Tir and Rudy and the Lady Alde about machines that